


In Perfect Silence at the Stars

by MorbidKitty



Series: To the Stars [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Commanding officer falls for a subordinate, Disabled Character, Duty over love, F/M, Older Woman/Younger Man, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Stupid sexy fighter pilot, Surpressed emotions, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-12 20:18:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5679400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidKitty/pseuds/MorbidKitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Within hours of the man’s arrival on D’Qar, the buzzing and giggling had spread from the landing strip to the outer edges of the Resistance Base. Within days, a record number of soldiers, officers and mechanics seemed to be half in love with Poe Dameron.</p><p>A commanding officer soon learns that even the most disciplined sometimes fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An X-wing Named Desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's everyone's favorite pilot.

Within hours of the man’s arrival on D’Qar, the buzzing and giggling had spread from the landing strip to the outer edges of the Resistance Base. Within days, a record number of soldiers, officers and mechanics seemed to be half in love with Poe Dameron. So far Colonel Fox had seen an experienced mechanic choose the wrong wrench and hand it to his assistant, one of her own Recon officers mess up her own name, and a canteen worker drop a tray full of dirty dishes. All because the new Commander had flashed an unguarded smile, perhaps said a few words – most likely a simple “hello.”  
  
As all other key leaders of the Resistance, Fox had met Poe Dameron on his first day at the Base. They’d shaken hands in the Command Center and exchanged simple pleasantries as he glowed with enthusiasm for his new post. Introductions with new Commanders always felt a touch awkward for Fox. There was little she did not already know about the new additions to the Resistance. After gaining lead of the Recon Unit three years ago, she had insisted on careful background checks of all handpicked recruits. Poe Dameron was no exception, and every detail about him, down to the origin of his BB-unit had been carefully documented and reported to General Leia Organa.  
  
Fox strongly doubted she had so much as glanced at the report, though. General Organa had made her choice based on Dameron’s unsanctioned, foolishly brave solo quest to track a hijacked freighter while he was still with the New Republic Starfleet. While the General respected her Recon Lead, Fox’s recommendation to do a thorough sweep of the man was little more than an afterthought in Poe Dameron’s case.  
  
“Anyone who can run into three Star Destroyers, four frigates, two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and a swarm of TIE fighters and live to tell the tale may be just who we need to gain the upper hand,” the General had said and that was that.  
  
Still, Leia Organa had found a carefully polished report in her hand two days later.  
  
As Fox had watched Dameron talk with Admiral Ackbar, she’d recalled with amusement the annotation left by Lieutenant Mako at the bottom of Dameron’s briefing document: “In short, this guy has certain issues with authority. But I’m pretty convinced he could fly a protocol droid into a ventilation shaft. _Backwards_.”  
  
While it would have doubtlessly been entertaining, Fox seriously suspected Mako was exaggerating. She couldn’t have imagined anyone making such claims about the renowned Rebel pilot Wedge Antilles – even in his prime. But then, a little over a week into his tenure with the Resistance’s Starfighter Corps, Dameron had done a corkscrew dive from the upper levels of D’Qar’s atmosphere, breaking the sound wall, before decelerating violently and pulling up to gracefully skim the waters near the Base. Everyone who had seen the stunt had erupted into loud cheers, declaring that Poe Dameron had some serious balls. Meanwhile, General Antilles had grudgingly ordered the mechanics to re-evaluate the limits of the X-wings’ structural stress resistance.  
  
It was exactly the sort of behavior that made Fox doubt Dameron’s suitability for highly covert missions and she admitted as much to General Organa. Anyone could barrel into enemy territory and wreak havoc, but classified missions were an entirely different matter and demanded a far more subtle touch. Urged by Leia Organa, Fox had nonetheless ordered him to do several scouting missions and long-range recon flights with his squadrons as the months rolled past. While he had not yet outright disobeyed her by plummeting headfirst into confrontations whenever his scanners spotted a TIE fighter, Fox sensed an almost fiery impatience about the man. She had seen this kind of desire to act rashly before and nine times out of ten it stemmed from a misplaced desire to prove oneself.  
  
It did not help that his attitude rubbed off on those under his command. Having witnessed firsthand the consequences of young Commanders taking things into their own hands, Fox had quickly decided to teach him a gentle lesson about patience once a good opportunity presented itself.  
  
Inspired by his numerous successful flight operations and hair-raising training stunts, the enamored atmosphere at the Base reached levels bordering on the ridiculous. His effect on the collective libido of the Resistance was particularly palpable when Dameron entered the Recon Center one afternoon, following a meeting in the Command Center. His unexpected appearance caused a third of Fox’s officers to steal shy glances at the pilot and the spherical droid that was never far behind him.  
  
Unlike the Command Center, where the General and other key Resistance leaders convened, the Recon Center was permanently illuminated by the blue lights of the monitors and holograms her officers used. “The Blue Room”, as it was called by Leia Organa, was its own space somewhat removed from the Command Center to maintain an even higher level of confidentiality. With only one exit and a large window giving a panorama of the Command Center, the space was ideal for impromptu meetings alone with the General while staying in touch with the happenings of the Command Center.  
  
Spotting the Colonel, the pilot greeted her respectfully, but he looked somewhat put upon, his dark eyes mirthless. Sullen as he looked, Fox couldn’t help noticing he still would have made the perfect face for a recruitment poster.  
  
“Commander Dameron,” she said pleasantly, walking over to him. She noted how his eyes didn’t stray to the sturdy brace on her left leg. With her steps often accompanied by its faint clinking, most couldn’t help glancing at it out of curiosity.  
  
“Apologies about barging in like this,” he said in a clipped tone. “But I didn’t want to prolong the meeting in the Command Center.”  
  
_Ah._ So her lesson had stung, and now he was angry about being passed over for the mission. Fox had seen his jaw clench as she had announced the chosen squadrons for a series of carefully timed recon flights planned for the next three days in several different systems. Neither the Blue nor the Red squadron had been mentioned. Instead, the squadrons directly under Dameron’s command would accompany a Resistance freighter to the Inner Rim to visit a few starfighter academies for recruitment purposes. The Commander hadn’t said anything during the briefing, but Fox had guessed correctly that he wouldn’t accept her decision meekly.  
  
“I assume you’re here about the recon flights,” she said, ready for a confrontation.  
  
He shifted in place. “Yes, Colonel. May I ask why both my squadrons were passed over in favor of the Stiletto and the Dagger squadrons?”  
  
She regarded him coolly for a moment. Fox was used to the blue hue of the room casting an eerie glow on people, making them appear paler, regardless of species. With Poe Dameron, the light flattered his features, making his eyes seem almost as black as space.  
  
She decided her team didn’t need to hear the lecture. “Follow me, Commander.”  
  
She led him into a small adjoining room where her private, sparsely decorated office was located. As the door closed in front of his droid, it let out an indignant squawk, bumping against the barrier.  
  
“It’s alright, BB-8,” he called after the droid.  
  
Fox circled around her desk, carefully avoiding knocking over the cane that leaned against it, before she turned to face the pilot. “It’s not a question of skill if that is your concern.”  
  
“What is it, then?” he asked, straightening to his full height, only a little taller than her.  
  
She crossed her arms. “The recon flights I run require speed, compliance, and subtlety. You possess the former – heaps of it, in fact. But I am not entirely convinced when it comes to the latter two.”  
  
“With respect, Colonel, I have already led several missions with good results – ”  
  
Fox held up a slim hand to silence him. “I am not claiming the results you’ve delivered have been in any way disappointing. However, you have consistently shown yourself to struggle with mission parameters when you feel they limit your actions.”  
  
His jaw clenched again. “I was under the impression I was brought here to help gain the upper hand on the First Order.”  
  
“And that is what you are doing. Your squadrons take their cue from you, Commander. A little patience goes a long way and will keep you and your enthusiastic pilots alive long enough to see the First Order demolished.”  
  
For a second she thought he was going to argue further, but then his shoulders relaxed and he broke eye contact.  
  
“You will have your share of shining moments behind the stick, Commander Dameron, trust me,” Fox assured him, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice entirely. She pushed away from her desk and opened the sliding door to signal it was time for him to leave. “With the increased First Order activity we have picked up on our scanners, it is only a matter of time.”  
  
He nodded, stepping back in the Blue Room. The little droid made an enthusiastic sound at seeing its master.  
  
“Thank you for your time, Colonel,” he said, giving her a small, polite smile. “It’s best I get back to work. Apologies again for the interruption.”  
  
She watched him leave with the BB-unit at his heels. It swiveled its head to look back at her, its lens focusing intently before the door slid shut again. Fox made her way back to her console and when the uncharacteristic silence in the room persisted, she cleared her throat loudly to bring her team back in line. The Recon officers sprang to work as she watched the dark-haired Commander stride across the Command Center without a backward glance.

 

* * *

 

The repurposed Nubian corvette was a striking sight in the hangar. Its dark grey hull was smooth as a polished rock, hiding the ship’s canons under a deceptively elegant surface. The craft had been requisitioned for Fox to function as her ship whenever she needed to travel between planets and systems, quickly and unseen. It was fitted with a full recon room of its own and enough space for a small squad of soldiers, a compact medical bay, and comfortable private quarters for a commanding officer.  
  
Walking around it to inspect its imposing thrusters, Fox could already imagine how its wings would cut through the vacuum of space.  
  
“Nylah!” hooted an old mechanic working at an open panel. “We’ll have your new ship ready tomorrow.”  
  
Fox sighed. Experience had taught her there was no convincing the old man to address her less informally, not even in front of Resistance soldiers. He had fixed up her first speeder when she had joined the Resistance as a fresh-faced cadet and through the years he had stubbornly called her “Nylah” or “Bluey”.  
  
“Good to see you, too, Snipes. How’s this thruster?” she asked, pointing at the one on the far left. Unlike the other three, most of it was missing.  
  
“We’re waiting for a crucial part. The thruster itself is ready, just need to install it. Don’t worry, we’ll have this beauty in the air soon and she’ll be fast as hell.”  
  
“That’s very good news,” Fox said, following the smooth line of the left wing with her eyes. “I look forward to flying her.”  
  
She walked back to the front of the ship and watched as a young Sullustan recruit instructed an astromech to do diagnostics on the ship’s life support systems. The day was hot and she loosened her collar a little, thinking of a nice cold glass of water.  
  
“It sure is quite something,” a voice said to her right.  
  
Fox looked over and her mouth went very dry indeed.  
  
Poe Dameron was dressed down, wearing only his black pants, boots, and a sleeveless white shirt. Whatever he had been working on at the landing strip had made him sweat, plastering his dark hair against his neck and forehead. His dog tags glinted on his chest and here and there his skin was smeared with black engine oil.  
  
“It clearly pays off being the boss,” he continued, flashing Fox a grin. His eyes roamed the sweeping hull of the corvette appreciatively. “Getting to ride something like this…”  
  
Fox wasn’t listening. She was staring at Dameron, half in shock and entirely unable to look away from the crow’s feet at the corners of his dark eyes. He smelled like the innards of an X-wing – and something else. It reminded her vividly of the lush green forests of Yavin 4 at night.  
  
“Colonel?”  
  
His voice snapped her out her reverie.  
  
“Dameron,” she said stiffly, wondering a touch hysterically if he had spotted her ogling. “Excuse me, I was thinking. About the ship. What did you say?”  
  
He shrugged. “Nothing important, just wondering if you still needed someone to pilot it for you.”  
  
“I have a pilot,” Fox answered slowly, trying to read his face. If she hadn’t known better, she might have genuinely suspected him of _teasing_ her, his superior.  
  
“Alright,” he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.  
  
They stood in comfortable silence for a moment until he turned fully towards her. “Ma’am, I just wanted to say I’m not in any way offended about what we discussed the other day. You’ve given me something to think about.”  
  
She studied his face. He seemed sincere, his hands clasped behind his back. It was a stark contrast to the defiant embers she had glimpsed in his eyes during the discussion in her office.  
  
“Very good, Commander,” she eventually conceded. “Now, as pleasant as it would be to spend all day discussing ships and pilots, I must get back to the Blue Room. As you were.”  
  
Fox left the pilot to gaze at the corvette and headed back towards the buildings. As she walked, she felt strangely light-headed and touched her forehead, wondering if she had a fever or if the weather was playing tricks on her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my lovely beta for her help with brainstorming and proofreading.
> 
> Tags, characters etc. will be updated as the story moves forward.
> 
> Constructive criticism, encouragement and kudos are always appreciated! I am nothing but a squeaking fan. You can also find me on Tumblr. My username is morbid-kitty. Come say hi!


	2. Mesmeric Revelations

Fox was glad there was no reason to converse with Poe Dameron for a full three days after the uncomfortably hot day on the landing strip.  
  
On the first day, she found herself precariously balanced between an urge to dissect and analyze her reaction to Dameron’s rugged, not entirely unappealing appearance and the kneejerk reaction of crushing any such urge under her reinforced left foot. The former option meant replaying the encounter in her head and attempting to examine it as one would an anomaly on a strange planet. The latter approach, meanwhile, seemed more sensible but decidedly unsatisfactory.  
  
Fox’s solution was to staunchly ignore anything and everything related to fighter pilots.  
  
On the second day, she was waiting for Lieutenant Mako to finalize the first findings of the recon flights, when she thought she glimpsed an orange flight suit in the Command Center. When it turned out to be a brightly colored astromech following its master, Fox felt genuinely disappointed for half a second. She quickly wrestled her thoughts towards more productive pursuits with as little as possible to do with Poe Dameron.  
  
With Lieutenant Mako overseeing the quiet Recon Center, Fox spent most of the third day in the Base’s training room, teaching a group of inexperienced cadets and young recruits her combat specialty – hand-to-hand. When a cadet, the son of a New Republic senator, whispered that he doubted Fox’s qualifications to teach the discipline, she invited him to attack her. The boy charged overconfidently and went to swing at Fox with his right fist. She ducked, took one stride to her left and, using the momentum of her sidestep, struck him painfully across the back with her cane. The cadet fell flat on his stomach, groaning in pain from the blow on his kidneys.  
  
Without bothering to look at the humiliated boy, she continued to address her audience: “This brings us to the next point I wanted to make: never take your opponent at face value.”  
  
The group, save for the cadet on the ground, made for a rapt audience for the remainder of the session.  
  
On the fourth day, a distress signal lit up the main monitor in the Recon Center and the Unit exploded into action.  
  
“Prepare my ship immediately,” Fox barked, striding over to the monitor to identify the unique call signature. “It’s agent Wolke. I will need six soldiers and a medical droid with me!”  
  
“Colonel, Wolke’s signal has been intercepted,” called Mauvi, a dark-skinned cadet.  
  
“First Order?” she asked, alarmed.  
  
“Negative, ma’am, I’m trying to get a read on the ship, it’s – it’s one of our X-wings.”  
  
Before Fox had a chance to press Mauvi for more information, Major Brance from the Command Center burst into the room.  
  
“Commander Dameron just called in,” he panted. “He’s returning from the Inner Rim with his squadrons and the freighter. He says his droid has caught a distress signal. He sent the signature over for us to take a look at it. Fox – I think it’s one of yours. The Commander sounds like he wants to investigate the source of the signal.”  
  
“How in the hell did an astromech intercept it?” Fox said sharply, without really expecting an answer. “Never mind. Thank you, Major, I will take it from here. Mako, get me Dameron!”  
  
“Patching through to Commander Dameron,” Mako responded immediately.  
  
In a few seconds, Dameron’s voice filled the Blue Room. “Colonel?”  
  
“Commander, I’ve just heard from Major Brance that your droid has intercepted a signal,” Fox said. “I don’t know how that happened, but you are not to respond to it as it is none of your concern.”  
  
When he didn’t reply immediately, she could almost see his eyes narrowing skeptically. “Is it one of your agents or something, Colonel?”  
  
“ _None of your concern_ , Commander Dameron.”  
  
“Colonel, it will take significantly longer for anyone leaving from the Base to get to the agent from D’Qar. I am closer, I can get there faster.”  
  
“My unit has a procedure in place for incidents like this,” Fox argued in a steely voice. “As the Starfighter Corps’ Commander, you do not have the whole picture and your involvement could very well – ”  
  
“Colonel, we are detecting a jump to hyperspace at Commander Dameron’s coordinates,” Mauvi announced uncertainly, his brow furrowing worriedly.  
  
“Dammit!” Fox yelled, only just stopping herself from calling the pilot “that _fucker_ ” in front of her team. She grabbed her cane and made for the door. “My ship better be ready to lift off the second I am on it! Mako, with me! Lieutenant Kell, you have the Recon Center until my return.”  
  
“Aye, Colonel!” the Mon Calamari called.  
  
Grimacing at the sharp pain she felt in her knee at every step, Fox hoped she wouldn’t find the smoking remains of a downed X-wing, in addition to a fallen agent at her destination.

* * *

On the edge of the Anoat system, a black X-wing cruised silently in the wake of the Nubian corvette, its tired pilot and BB-unit scanning the surroundings for any threat. Inside the larger ship’s medical bay, Fox stood over the unconscious Wolke, studying his bruised face. The young Mirialan had a tight bandage around his chest and an IV attached to his arm. A monitor beeped in time with his pulse, now fairly steady – unlike a few hours ago. The medical droid looking after Wolke hummed softly and increased the flow of pain medication when he twitched restlessly.  
  
“How much did you give him?” Fox asked, watching the deep crease between Wolke’s eyebrows.  
  
“Obatu Wolke is on the standard dosage, Colonel,” it answered in an electronic, soft voice.  
  
He stirred again.  
  
“Give him more,” Fox said quietly, still looking at his face.  
  
Without a word, the droid pressed a button on a display by the stretcher. Slowly, Wolke’s face relaxed and he exhaled a long breath. Fox pulled the blanket over his legs higher until it covered his stomach. Satisfied that her agent was now as relaxed as possible, Fox decided it was time to prepare for the return to D’Qar.  
  
“Clean his face and keep him comfortable,” Fox ordered the droid. “If there’s any change in his condition, call for me immediately.”  
  
The droid resumed its soft humming, no doubt a feature of its programming, designed to soothe patients as well as those worrying over them. As the doors of the medical bay closed behind her, she hoped Wolke’s sleep would be dreamless and empty. She returned to the ship’s bridge where her Togruta pilot Roskin was talking in hushed tones with Lieutenant Mako. On seeing the Colonel, they both straightened, looking at her cautiously.  
  
“It’s time to go home, this area is not safe,” Fox said to Roskin, pushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear.  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Roskin responded and went to the pilot’s seat to prepare for the jump. “I will inform Commander Dameron he should get ready.”  
  
The mention of his name aggravated Fox’s headache. It was damn lucky Dameron hadn’t flown his ship right in the middle of a First Order trap. Fox had yet to deal with the matter of his unauthorized meddling; a reality, which did nothing to alleviate the pounding she felt at her temple.  
  
“Commander,” Roskin said. “We are preparing to enter hyperspace. I’m sending over the coordinates. Let’s synchronize the jump.”  
  
“Affirmative, Captain,” Dameron answered from his X-wing. After a moment, he continued in a measured tone: “Colonel Fox?”  
  
“Yes, Commander?” she answered coolly, her shoulders tensing at his voice.  
  
“How is agent Wolke?”  
  
She sighed, realizing just how exhausted she felt. “We’ll talk more about this in my office. For now, we need to get back to Base.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. “Ready for the jump on your mark, Captain Roskin.”  
  
As Fox reached her private quarters, the corvette and the X-wing had already entered the blue tunnel.

* * *

Fox sat in her office at the Recon Center, feeling unusually torn.  
  
For the past hour, she had been mulling over the incomplete report detailing agent Wolke’s ordeal and the rescue mission. With her agent still unconscious, it had not been possible to talk to him and she’d had to rely on Dameron’s account. After returning to the Base, Fox had questioned him relentlessly over the tiniest detail of Wolke’s rescue. To her surprise, he had answered all her questions precisely with no backtalk, despite her prickly demeanor.  
  
Fox stared at the spot where he had stood as he had walked her through the sequence of events following his arrival in the Anoat system. As Dameron had told it, after the jump that separated him from his squadrons, BB-8 had tracked Wolke’s distress signal to one of the gas giant Pujool’s moons. He had set his X-wing down at a spot near the signal’s source and had continued on foot, with BB-8 leading the way until Dameron had simply needed to follow the relentless blaster sounds to a ruined old refueling station. He’d assessed the situation quickly and had flanked the small party of attackers, taking all of them down with a few well-placed shots and a grenade.  
  
BB-8 had then located the severely injured, barely conscious agent hiding behind a row of old barrels, a smoking entry wound on his chest. The Commander had done all he could for Wolke and just as he had been about to carry the man to his X-wing, Fox’s ship had emerged from behind a hill, its canons at the ready. He’d told BB-8 to watch over Wolke and had then guided Fox’s squad to the agent who had been taken aboard the corvette and rushed to the medical bay.  
  
From there, Fox had taken over, ordering the Commander and her squad to make a quick sweep of the area and to collect any clues on the bodies of Wolke’s attackers. Meanwhile, she had overseen the medical droid’s handiwork.  
  
To her disappointment, her squad leader had returned to report there had been nothing on the bodies to help identify them or the reason for their presence on the moon. As a result, Fox had found herself with an injured agent, no clues, and an insubordinate if heroic Commander.  
  
She rose from her chair, feeling frustrated. Part of her wanted to tear into Dameron’s insubordination and to recommend that General Organa ground him for a while. The simple truth was that he could have gotten himself killed and the Resistance could not afford to lose the Commander of its modest Starfighter Corps, no matter how expendable he seemed to consider himself to be.  
  
He also happened to be the best pilot she had ever seen.  
  
But without him, Wolke would most certainly have died. When Dameron had run to Fox’s descending corvette to meet her soldiers, Fox had stood on the open ramp to send the squad off. He’d had his blaster in one hand and his eyes had been bright with urgency, looking for all the galaxy like a true Commander should. As their eyes had met, he had nodded at her wordlessly before leading the squad to Wolke.  
  
Fox could only hope the relief she had felt on seeing him unharmed wasn’t written all over her face for all to see. Least of all him.  
  
Sighing, Fox took her cane and left her office, deciding that a more personal touch was needed. Fox had an idea where she find him and headed outside to the landing strip.

* * *

Dameron’s X-wing, Black One, was in its spot as Fox had expected. Hoping to find its pilot, she walked around the ship and faced the most curious sight.  
  
Decked out in his flight suit, Poe Dameron was sitting cross-legged on the ground facing his BB-unit. As strange as it seemed, it looked like the pair was having a staring competition of sorts. The Commander rocked to the right and the droid followed his movement. Then he rocked to left and the droid made a high-pitched squeak as it mimicked him again. She heard Dameron say something, which sounded vaguely like astromech binary. Based on the droid’s response, Dameron’s attempt wasn’t very impressive at all. The man laughed at his droid’s comment, almost tipping over backwards.  
  
“Alright, buddy,” he said as he got up to dust himself. “Hang on a minute, let me check something and we’ll go.”  
  
As he climbed up the side of his X-wing to reach inside the cockpit, Fox approached BB-8 who greeted her with an excited squeal.  
  
“Who is it, Baby?” Dameron asked, his torso half-hidden inside the open cockpit.  
  
BB-8 named the visitor, which was followed by Dameron hitting his head on something. This in turn made the droid beep in alarm. She heard the man mutter a muffled curse and reassure BB-8 that he was fine and nothing was in fact bleeding. Hissing slightly, he came down the ladder and turned to Fox.  
  
“Colonel!” he said, rubbing his temple. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. BB-8 and I were just… it’s nothing.” He wiped his hands on his flight suit, looking a bit flustered. “I… Any change in agent Wolke’s condition?”  
  
“Still unconscious but the doctors prefer it that way for now,” Fox answered. “At least he is stable.”  
  
“That’s good. He didn’t look so good when BB-8 found him.”  
  
The droid made a little sound at the mention of its name.  
  
“Baby?” Fox asked, unable to keep from grinning as she raised an eyebrow.  
  
Dameron shrugged and answered her grin with one of his own. “BB-8, Baby-8… no difference, really.”  
  
“That _is_ quite the droid you have,” Fox conceded, her eyes on BB-8, who was looking up at its master expectantly. “I don’t think I’ve ever met or heard of an astromech quite like it.”  
  
“BB-8 is one of a kind,” Dameron said proudly as he went down on one knee to wipe its lens. “Quick, helpful and a good friend. I was lucky to find it.”  
  
After a brief silence, Fox took a deep breath and adjusted her grip on her cane. “I came here to thank you, Commander. Your actions saved agent Wolke’s life.”  
  
Dameron looked up at her, still at BB-8’s level. He seemed to study her face before answering. “I only did what I felt was right, Colonel.”  
  
“I know,” Fox said. “I _am_ willing to overlook your insubordination, considering my agent is in one piece as a result. But only because of that.”  
  
The corner of his mouth twitched as he tried to hide a smile.  
  
“Don’t go making a habit of it, though,” Fox urged him, turning to leave. “I’ve got to go finish a report. As you were, Dameron.”  
  
“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” he called after her, even as his smile got wider.  
  
Later that night, when Fox found herself unable to fall asleep, she realized she was in trouble.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all the kudos! Thanks should also go to my wonderfully helpful beta.
> 
> Credit for inspiration for the scene with BB-8 and Poe goes to this incredibly cute comic: http://kadeart.tumblr.com/post/136258107444/stare-competition
> 
> In the next chapter, you'll get Poe's point of view. ;)


	3. Her Most Daring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we get Poe's point of view and meet Obatu Wolke properly.

Lying on his narrow bed, Poe Dameron thought that if there was something that did not suit him, it was days off. When he was on duty, he flew most of the time with little BB-8 accompanying him on every trip and mission. When he wasn’t on duty, he wanted to fly – and so did the droid if its occasional drawn out beeps were any indication.  
  
This, however, was not Yavin 4 where he could take his mother’s old starfighter for a spin any time he wished. While training flights that didn’t reach the highest level of D’Qar’s atmosphere were allowed most of the time, the Resistance had to exercise a certain degree of stealth. With the galaxy infested with First Order probes, any careless flights could have posed an unnecessary risk. After agent Wolke’s narrow escape, General Organa had insisted on heightened vigilance, and several flights, including training runs, had been pushed back.  
  
Poe had a strong feeling he knew who had requested the General to enforce such a high level of caution.  
  
He huffed, knowing he shouldn’t grumble even alone in his room. A seemingly boring and unproductive day in the Resistance was still more rewarding than a full day of patrolling with the Starfleet. That’s what he enjoyed the most about being with the Resistance – feeling like he was doing something worthwhile, instead of being held back by red tape and people who preferred to look the other way, pretending the First Order was nothing more than a small group of zealots. His former Commanding Officer, Major Lonno Deso, had been like that. Poe still remembered jabbing his finger on the Major’s table to get him to act, only to feel like he couldn’t make a difference even if he’d smashed his face in.  
  
Not for the first time, Poe felt an overwhelming surge of gratefulness towards Leia Organa, a bona fide _legend_ , for giving him and his co-pilots a chance to put their skills and commitment to good use.  
  
BB-8 made a soft sound, almost cooing in the corner of Poe’s dimly lit room as it suggested an activity.  
  
“Go see agent Wolke? I think he might still be a bit too injured to receive guests, buddy.”  
  
BB-8 answered vaguely that it knew better.  
  
Cocking an eyebrow, Poe raised his head to look at the tiny droid. “And how do you know that? Have you been talking with the main computer again?”  
  
BB-8’s answering silence was total and revealing. Poe laughed and pushed himself to a sitting position.  
  
“So… is he awake and receiving guests?”  
  
At the droid’s affirmative beep, Poe scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully. Despite saving Wolke on the moon, the two hadn’t exchanged a single word. When he had reached the agent and his blurry eyes had focused on the color of Poe’s flight suit and the black insignia on his vest, Wolke had let the pistol fall from his hand as he’d realized his rescue had arrived. Before Poe had even had a chance to introduce himself, Wolke had lost consciousness.  
  
Poe made a show of sighing in mock exasperation before he got up to pull on his boots. BB-8 squealed excitedly and rolled to the door from its charging station.  
  
“You know me all too well,” he said, shaking his head, as he reached for his leather jacket.  
  
He opened the door to let BB-8 out first. Poe wasn’t surprised to see only a few people on his way to the Medi-Bay. Most who saw him acknowledged him with a happy shout of his name or a wave of a hand. The last few days had been quiet and several Units had given their members a few days off to spend with friends and leisure activities. Several took the time to get together with their partners behind closed doors, a fact Poe had explained to BB-8 to stop the droid from wandering off to investigate any room that may have been thus occupied.  
  
As Poe turned a corner to a narrow hallway leading to his destination, he almost ran into Colonel Fox. He was about to stop and greet her properly but she seemed to be in a hurry to move on.  
  
“Sorry, ma’am,” he said quickly, stepping out of her path only to have her mirror his movement. He tried to sidestep again automatically – and she did as well. He looked up at her face, amused by their awkward shuffling. Clearing his throat, Poe stepped almost ceremoniously out of her way and hoped she would at least crack a smile. Instead, his gesture was met with the professional courtesy of a brief nod and a quickly muttered version of his title as she passed him, brushing lightly against his arm. Watching her go, he noted that she was walking briskly, her cane left somewhere this time.  
  
When he’d first met her, Poe hadn’t been sure what to make of Nylah Fox. After a number of months with the Resistance and several meetings with her, he still felt like he hadn’t even begun to see beneath the surface. Poe had always been quick at reading people, able to guess their real intentions and wishes from the way they would say something innocently as an afterthought, how their posture would change, and how they would suddenly look away from his eyes. It was a skill that surprised those who flew with him and those who commanded him. He intuitively knew who got along with who, which had helped him deal with his squadrons, first as a rank and file pilot, later as a Commander. People’s little tells tended to reveal not only their weaknesses but also their very best features, without them truly realizing it. It had helped him guide young pilots and cadets to improve their skills as well as to find common ground with several commanding officers.  
  
Fox seemed to have no such tells. She had met his grins, occasional temperamental moods and experimental comments with the same steady gaze in those grey eyes. Sometimes she had surprised him with a good-natured smile, perhaps even a quip of her own. Once or twice he’d thought he‘d glimpsed a hint of something else – an unfinished thought or perhaps a memory that he couldn’t quite grasp – cross her face like a ripple in still water.  
  
BB-8 made an impatient sound, pushing past him.  
  
“Alright then,” Poe said, chuckling at the droid’s impatience. “You lead the way.”  
  
The Medi-Bay was quiet as well with only a few patients recovering from injuries or slight illness. Doctor Kalonia was looking through a patient chart as Poe stepped inside after BB-8.  
  
“Poe!” she said, giving him a warm smile before looking concerned. “You’re not sick, are you?”  
  
“No, no,” he assured her. “Well, just sick of not doing anything.”  
  
Kalonia laughed, her eyes sparkling. “You should learn to enjoy the quiet time. Are you here to see someone then perhaps?”  
  
He nodded sheepishly. “I was hoping I could talk to Obatu Wolke. Is he up?”  
  
“Yes, Colonel Fox just saw him. He has been doing a lot better over the past few days, and he’s now out of the intensive care section. I suppose it’s alright. Just… try not say anything terribly funny.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“The wound in his chest,” Kalonia said in a tone that suggested the answer was obvious. “In short, it hurts to laugh.”  
  
“I’ll try not to be quite so funny, then,” Poe promised, grinning.  
  
He was about to ask where the agent’s bed was when BB-8 happily announced it had found Obatu. Poe excused himself to follow his droid and found the Mirialan in a seated position on his bed. Obatu was looking almost healthy which was a welcome contrast to his ashen complexion when Poe had last seen him. Now that his face was clean of soot and blood, Poe could have easily counted the diamond-shaped black tattoos over his nose.  
  
“You must be Poe Dameron,” Obatu said when he spotted his visitor. “Thanks for saving my ass.”  
  
“Hi,” Poe said as he walked over to him. “You remember me, then?”  
  
Obatu smiled. “I remember an orange flight suit and a very shapely droid. I wasn’t exactly at my best when we last met. It’s good to meet you.”  
  
BB-8 whistled, sharply enough to command immediate attention yet softly enough to not bother the other patients.  
  
“Glad to meet you too, my round friend,” Obatu said to the droid before looking back at Poe. “Fox has told me a lot about you. That’s how I knew your name.”  
  
“All good, I hope?” Poe asked, trying not to sound as curious as he felt.  
  
“Well, you know how she is,” Obatu said, a sly look on his face. “Don’t worry, man, she can be tough but she gives credit where it’s due. She said you are ‘a little too spontaneous’ but ‘a decent shot’.”  
  
Poe laughed. He had thought Fox had seemed vaguely impressed when he’d told her about having shot four of his attackers before they had spotted him. Fox had an old sniper rifle on a wall in her office and not just for show, he suspected. While the title of the best pilot of the Resistance had already been bestowed on him, he wondered who was the best shot. The question emerged in his mind like a pleasant distraction every time he visited Fox’s office. He had no doubt the Colonel had spotted his wandering eyes.  
  
Obatu coughed softly. At first Poe thought his injury bothered to him, but soon it became obvious the man was trying not to laugh too hard.  
  
“One of the nurses told me that…” Obatu chuckled, fighting to keep his laughter shallow. “A nurse told me Fox beat the crap out of some cadet a few days back.”  
  
“Why’d she do that?” Poe asked as he sat down on a small stool by the bed.  
  
“I’ve heard some gossip,” Obatu said, attempting a shrug. “The newcomers tend to talk a lot – and _loudly_.” He sighed, looking away from Poe.  
  
“What did you hear?” he asked cautiously.  
  
Obatu watched him with a studious look. For a moment, Poe saw a reflection of Fox in his dark eyes. “Apparently, some idiot made a comment about her not being a suitable instructor for hand-to-hand.”  
  
Poe shook his head. He could barely believe someone could be stupid enough to make such a comment. “Why wouldn’t she be qualified?”  
  
Obatu made another attempt at a shrug. “I suppose some people see the brace on her leg or the cane in her hand and ignore everything else. That’s probably the case with the guy who made the comment. She educated him. Told him to have a go at her and then dealt with him. Or that’s what I heard. Wish I’d seen it. She can wield that cane like no one’s business.”  
  
Poe had to agree it would have been quite something. From Fox’s posture alone, it was clear she was no punching bag. Just the way she had looked when she had arrived on Pujool’s moon on her ship, her hair whipping about her face as she stood on the ramp, had been rather striking.  
  
Obatu and Poe talked for a little while more, mostly about BB-8 and Obatu’s healing process. The young agent was upbeat about his recovery and already looking forward to returning to the field. His only concern seemed to be convincing Fox that he had no qualms about going back.  
  
“Wouldn’t mind having a droid like yours around, that’s for sure,” Obatu said, nodding at BB-8.  
  
As Poe walked back to his room, he found General Organa standing by the door. She beckoned him closer and said in a low voice: “Meet with Colonel Fox at the shooting range tomorrow morning at sunrise. Alone.”  
  
It seemed his off duty time was over.

 

* * *

 

Behind the hangars, the Resistance had set up an area where anyone could do target practice with holograms safely. A small control panel had been set up to provide a variety of red floating targets that would change direction and speed unexpectedly. The steep mossy hill at the end of the stretch of even ground was marked with blaster burns, resulting from missed shots.  
  
When Poe arrived, Fox was already standing by the control panel with what Poe recognized as an old, pre-Empire rifle held against her shoulder. Her long red hair was pulled back and her stance showed the skill of an experienced sniper. A group of small red targets dashed to and fro in the air. Fox tracked one for a few seconds before shooting it down.  
  
“Morning,” Poe said.  
  
“Commander,” Fox answered, turning around as she lowered the barrel of the weapon. The morning was unusually cold so in addition to her normal black and blue uniform, she was wearing a coat with the Resistance emblem on her chest. Usually barely discernible under the interior lighting of the Base, the bright morning sun made the thin scar across her left cheek stand out more.  
  
Poe expected to find another gun waiting for him but seeing Fox had only brought one rifle, he shoved his hands in his pockets. He hoped it made him seem a bit less anxious to hear what she had to say. He was _itching_ to be sent on a mission.  
  
“Today, you’re going on a vacation,” Fox said, returning to her aiming position. “You will leave for Yavin 4, wearing your civilian clothing. There’s an old X-wing waiting for you on the landing strip, next to Black One.” She shot, hitting her target dead center.  
  
“I wasn’t aware of this, Colonel,” Poe said slowly.  
  
“Of course you weren’t,” she said lightly and handed him the gun without offering a word of explanation.  
  
Poe took the gun, wondering what was going on. He knew Fox well enough to guess the strange conversation was leading towards something. She wasn’t the type to waste anyone’s time.  
  
As Poe began to aim at a hologram using the scope of the rifle, Fox spoke in a low voice: “You are going to Jakku. There is a man called Lor San Tekka in a small village. He has information that is of vital importance to Leia Organa. You are to meet with him and bring this information back to us. Undetected.”  
  
Poe shot at his target, only grazing it as it changed direction suddenly. He hadn't expected to hear the name of a childhood hero.  
  
“What does this information concern, then?” he asked, determined to hit the next target in the center.  
  
“Luke Skywalker’s whereabouts.”  
  
Thinking he’d misheard her, Poe turned to look at Fox, letting the gun drop a little.  
  
“You’re the fourth person to know this,” she continued. “You naturally understand the secrecy. This mission doesn’t exist, Commander. If anyone asks where you are going, you say you are going to see your father on Yavin 4.”  
  
”How did you find out about Lor San Tekka having information about the General’s brother?”  
  
Fox raised her eyebrow in a silent answer. Poe shook his head. Well, it _was_ rather obvious.  
  
“Alright, who else knows?” he asked.  
  
“The General and myself, of course, my best agent… And now – you.”  
  
Poe wanted to ask about the agent but instead focused on shooting a few targets, deciding Fox’s best agent was a topic for another time.  
  
“I wanted to send my agent after the information,” Fox admitted as she watched him shoot. “But the General insisted I choose you.”  
  
“I’ll try not to disappoint.” He handed the gun back to her and she placed it by the panel.  
  
“One more thing,” Fox said and fished a tiny, shiny grey object from her pocket. “Take this.”  
  
Poe took it from her carefully, lightly brushing the tips of his fingers against hers. He turned the item over in his hand. It was flat, round and entirely unremarkable. It could have easily been mistaken for the flat end of a bolt or an ordinary button from someone’s jacket.  
  
“What is it?” he asked.  
  
“Your life insurance,” she said matter-of-factly and turned off the holograms. “It’s an emergency transmitter. It won’t show up on any scans and it won’t attract any attention. Lose your ship, lose your gun, lose your shoes… but _not this_.”  
  
“How does it work?”  
  
“Hold it with two fingers. Now, pull on the other side, gently.”  
  
The button slid open, revealing a glimpse of a tiny blue circuit.  
  
“There’s a thin seam down the middle. The next step would be to twist it around halfway and close it again. No matter where you are, an alarm will go off in the Recon Center.”  
  
“That’s it?”  
  
“Then you stay alive – and wait for my ship.”  
  
Poe didn’t like the idea of waiting for rescue but he was grateful to have the backup option. He closed the object, smoothing his thumb over its flat surface. “Your agents have these?”  
  
Fox nodded. “Hide it in plain sight. Enemies always check pockets, shoes, bags… They won’t waste time inspecting anything they can see at a glance.”  
  
Poe followed her logic quickly. “I’ll fix it into my jacket.”  
  
“You might take it off.”  
  
“Not likely, it’s my favorite.”  
  
When she didn’t look convinced, he shrugged. “Alright, I’ll think of something else.”  
  
“You should,” Fox said, grabbing the rifle. “Dismissed, Commander.”  
  
Poe saluted her and turned on his heels to head back to the Base for some final preparations before his departure. He’d tell BB-8 what the purpose of their trip was only after they had taken off from D’Qar. He knew the droid didn’t like being kept in the dark.  
  
“Dameron,” Fox called after him. “Do be careful.”  
  
He couldn’t help smiling as he stopped to answer her. “Is that an order, Colonel?”  
  
She looked a bit sad then. For a moment, he thought she was unwilling to send him out on the mission, albeit for a different reason than the recon flights.  
  
“I am asking you to be careful,” she repeated, not a hint of humor in her voice.  
  
Feeling like he should reassure her, he turned back towards her and said: “I’ll be back before you know it, Fox.” When her expression showed no change, he added: “Count on it. Besides, BB-8 will take care of me.”  
  
When the corner of her mouth turned up slightly and she looked away, he felt the veil between them had lifted a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *gasp* And then we move onto the events of The Force Awakens! :O
> 
> I'm super nervous about what you guys think of the way I write Poe. If it's not too much trouble, do let me know what you think!
> 
> Once again: my beta owns my soul.


	4. Pulse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fox waits for Poe to return from Jakku.

During her years leading the Recon Unit, Fox had realized there were even worse things than hiding in the cargo hold of an enemy ship, trying not to breathe too loudly. It was worse to be the Commanding Officer waiting in the Base, left to wonder how many lone agents and recon officers were in that situation at any given moment – and whether one of them would make a mistake.  
  
Should someone be discovered, Fox could only hope the combat training she had given them would save them. She had considered putting Poe Dameron through a crash course of hand-to-hand the same morning she sent him to Jakku but had decided against it, putting the urge to train a qualified commander down to her own nerves. Finding Luke Skywalker was absolutely imperative, and thus the mission to make contact with Lor San Tekka was Fox’s most important one so far. Out of an old habit from her own days as an agent, she had almost volunteered to go to Jakku herself.  
  
Instead, she had put forward the name of Cass Vektra, a Clawdite changeling – although only the Colonel was privy to that little detail – and her most trusted agent. It was Vektra who had visited the Base to tell Fox about the old man on Jakku and the information he had. However, the General had been empathically clear about wanting to send the man she called “the most daring pilot” they had. Fox didn’t doubt this was a time for some added bravery and if anyone could deliver it, it was Poe Dameron.  
  
She also happened to think the man was the snarkiest pilot the Resistance had. Before he’d entered hyperspace, he had contacted Fox in her office to say he was entering radio silence and that she’d hear from him after his return to the Ileenium system.  
  
“Covert mission,” he’d said, a grin evident in his voice. “You naturally understand the secrecy.”  
  
Fox had almost groaned aloud, hating how the corner of her mouth had suddenly threatened to pull up into a smile. She’d told him to behave himself and to bring the unmarked X-wing back in one piece. With a light-hearted laugh and a “yes, ma’am”, he had disappeared from the comms line. Now Fox could do nothing but wait. Wait for the comms link to reopen so Dameron could announce he had succeeded and that he was unharmed.  
  
The _damn_ waiting. Fox _hated_ the waiting. It made her want to bite her fingernails, made her collar chafe against her neck and made her stimcaf taste like acid.  
  
In the privacy of her office, Fox let out a shuddering breath. It seemed to be happening more frequently as of late, caused no doubt by the Commander. She had been thinking of him more than she cared to admit. She had initially attempted to deal with her fascination with the pilot by going through the background document she had put together for Leia Organa and then filing it away for good, along with her crush.  
  
Instead, she had mentally filled in what she had learned about the man from her interactions with him. That, in addition to being insufferably handsome, he was flirtatious and didn’t care who knew it.  
  
Certainly didn’t care if Fox knew it.  
  
Their brief encounter outside the Medi-Bay had been almost torturous. Fox had tried to step around him quickly, but had been blocked on both attempts. Then Dameron had fixed her with one of his disarming looks before stepping out of her way with all too much charm.  
  
Caught off guard, she’d almost forgotten to breathe.  
  
She’d squeezed past him in the narrow hallway, berating herself for enjoying the physical proximity – and his attention, no matter how tongue-in-cheek he meant it. She was sure her outspoken Lieutenant would have made the lightning fast, rudimentary assessment of Fox simply being in dire need of a good lay. And Mako probably would have been right. It was apparent that for reasons visible to anyone who so much as glanced at Dameron, Fox had not been spared of the effect of the ace pilot.  
  
The realization brought a wry smile to her face.  
  
It did not, however, explain why her arm had tingled for the rest of the day after it had brushed against him. Neither did it explain how the feather-light touch of his fingers on hers at the shooting range had felt like the bite of a fire. She couldn’t remember feeling a sensation like it since she was just twenty and desperately sweet on a weapons instructor ten years older than her. And it didn’t explain the nearly overwhelming need she had felt to warn the Commander, to make him promise to be careful, to _come back_ from Jakku. To return safely to D’Qar, even if it meant the mission would fail. The words had flooded her mind and she’d damn near said them.  
  
It wasn’t that she hadn’t sent him on potentially dangerous missions before. This, however, was different. From earlier scans of the area, Fox knew it wasn’t a great place for a lone X-wing. Just the pirates roaming the system posed their own risk. Then of course there were the smugglers who didn’t care how they came by their cargo. Not to mention the yet unconfirmed First Order vessel sightings in that specific sector of the system –  
  
Stop right there, she told herself, almost jerking up from her chair before she winced from pain. She reached down to turn a small switch on her leg brace, increasing the resistance of the coils built in the metal so the structure would take more of her weight, allowing her knee to rest.  
  
Nothing is going to happen, Fox assured herself as she stood up carefully and left her office. With six of her team of nine on duty, the Blue Room was livelier than it had been for the past few days. Kell, her Mon Calamari Lieutenant, was busily teaching the Recon Unit’s newest member, a somewhat nervous twi’lek, the everyday basics of the Recon Center.  
  
“If you’re unsure about something or you’re not sure what to do and how, just say it,” Kell instructed the young cadet. “Everyone here prefers honesty over faking it, the Colonel in particular.”  
  
Listening to Kell’s confident monologue, Fox smirked. He had come far in the two years he had been under Fox’s command.  
  
Fox went to her own station, mentally calculating the time lapsed since Dameron’s departure to get an idea of his theoretical progress with the mission. She brought up the unmarked X-wing’s status on her monitor, pleased about the rudimentary system that allowed the Resistance to see the condition of their ships, although with some delay, depending on the distance between the Base and the spacecraft. Radio silence or not, the little bit of knowledge Fox did have made the waiting more tolerable.  
  
As expected, Dameron’s temporary X-wing showed as fully intact – until she blinked.  
  
The outline of the ship flashed bright red. She stared at it, struggling to comprehend its meaning despite having seen the same happen before.  
  
If she believed what she was seeing, then on the remote planet of Jakku, the old X-wing had just been utterly destroyed, mangled beyond repair, and it most certainly wasn’t coming back to D’Qar, carrying its precious pilot.  
  
Fox swayed on her feet and grabbed onto the edge of her station to stay upright, her knuckles turning white as she squeezed the metal table. From the corner of her eye, she could see Kell approach her discreetly.  
  
“Colonel?” Lieutenant Kell said, sounding concerned. “Is everything alright?”  
  
“Later,” Fox said and realized she barely recognized her own voice. When the Mon Calamari showed no sign of returning to his station, she gave him a stern look. He nodded courteously and immediately retreated to his monitor and continued instructing the cadet.  
  
Dreading the General’s reaction, Fox looked through the panorama window to the Command Center and saw Leia Organa staring at her own private monitor in what could only be described as paralyzed shock. She made no move to come to the Recon Center, did not contact Fox on the intercom as she normally would in situations like this; just sat there, white as a sheet.  
  
Feeling like she couldn’t breathe, Fox told Kell to keep things well in hand before the nightshift began and left the Blue Room.  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” he said without a single questioning glance in her direction. Fox would thank him later.  
  
Needing to get away from the underground complex that formed the heart of the Resistance’s operations, Fox made her way to the upper levels and stumbled outside through a side door. Dusk was falling and most activity was quieting down, with only a few shouts of a friend to another to hurry it up.  
  
Without planning to, Fox made her way towards the Starfighter Corps’ area of the landing strip, knowing only a handful of mechanics and astromechs would be around and even they would soon call it a night. She passed Old Snipes cleaning his tools, and he shouted after her but received no reply. Held in an unsteady hand, her cane made harsh gnashing sounds against the tarmac, but she didn’t stop until she came to the magnificent black X-wing. Her pulse beating against her throat, she let her eyes sweep over its dark hull.  
  
Silhouetted against the fading purple light in the sky, the fighter was all sharp, unforgiving angles and resembled a sleeping beast, waiting for its masterful pilot to take it to another battle. Suddenly wary of the ship’s still yet violent energy, Fox kept her distance as she imagined its engines come to life under Poe Dameron’s hands and tried to make sense of her emotions.  
  
Selfishly perhaps, she felt _cheated_. Like something had been lost before she’d even had a chance to consider doing anything about it.  
  
She stood there, furious at herself and heavy as lead with dark thoughts, until Leia Organa came looking for her and ordered her to go rest in a tone that left no room for argument.  
  
“We’ll send a salvage team tomorrow,” the regal woman said to her face. “Until then, there is nothing the living can do but rest to fight another day.”

* * *

Fox woke up gasping, covered in a cold sweat. The nightmare had been vivid with the deafening howl of a TIE fighter as it spiraled towards obliteration. After a series of swerves and maneuvers that defied belief, something had interrupted its graceful flight, sending it tumbling down to the planet below, a sad ending to a brave struggle.  
  
Fox couldn’t understand why she felt so stupidly morose over a damn TIE fighter.  
  
A hesitant knock at her door interrupted her thoughts and she got up. Conscious of her dressed down appearance, she threw on a robe before opening the door to find Numo Ban, the small twi’lek cadet Kell had been training earlier. He looked nervous and saluted Fox, uncertainly and completely unnecessarily.  
  
“Colonel… ma’am, I apologize for the intrusion but there is a… there seems to be a problem with one of the monitors.”  
  
“A problem with one of the monitors,” Fox repeated slowly.  
  
“There is…” The boy looked positively embarrassed, his blue face sweating. “There is a beep, ma’am. On your personal monitor.”  
  
“A beep.”  
  
“Yes, Colonel. At first we thought it was some sort of bug and would go away soon but it keeps going. Lieutenant Mako said it could be a distress signal but we cannot unlock your termi – ”  
  
Fox was already moving. With Numo Ban looking on, she threw her robe to a corner, pulled on her uniform trousers, fixed her brace in place in a matter of seconds, stepped in her boots before breezing past the cadet with her laces still open and her hair flowing free. As Fox made her way to the Recon Center with Numo Ban hot at her heels, her steps echoed loudly in the quiet base, startling a slumbering, red and white astromech.  
  
The Recon Center’s doors hissed as they opened, revealing another frightened cadet and Lieutenant Mako, hunched over Fox’s beeping terminal, her hand hovering above it hesitantly. Fox would have laughed at the sight if her heart hadn’t climbed to her throat the second Numo Ban had uttered the words “distress signal”.  
  
“Colonel,” Mako said, stepping aside to make way for Fox. “This began a few minutes ago.”  
  
Fox unlocked the terminal and immediately zoomed in on the beating blue circle in the Western Reaches. With her young subordinates looking on, she stared at it, expecting and fearing it was nothing, just a momentary misreading, a cruel glitch.  
  
But the gentle beeping wouldn’t let up and as it stubbornly maintained its steady, digital heartbeat, Fox felt strength return to her exhausted body and her mind focus on a single objective.  
  
“Prepare my ship,” Fox said, straightening. “We are going to Jakku.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am!” Mako said and told the twi’lek to go, run and drag Captain Roskin out of bed to prepare Fox’s corvette. “What is it? An agent?”  
  
Fox’s answer was bright laughter, giddy from relief as the knowledge that her pilot still walked among the living crashed into her and flooded her heart until she thought it would burst.  
  
“It’s Poe Dameron,” she announced breathlessly as she turned around to face the three uncomprehending officers. “He’s alive.”  
  
With long strides, she walked past her stunned crew, slowing only at the door of the Blue Room to shout over her shoulder. “Don’t just stand there, Lieutenant, keep up!”  
  
“Yes, ma’am!” Mako exclaimed, grabbing a few datapads before rushing after the Colonel.  
  
Even as her ship soared up into the clouds and into space, Fox, now fully dressed in her Colonel’s uniform, paced the length of the command bridge, willing the corvette to _fly faster_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> My beta is a life saver and this chapter too would have been incomplete without her help.


	5. Per Aspera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Through hardships...

A lone speeder glided above the hot desert, carrying a dark-haired man and a local scavenger. Poe Dameron was beyond exhausted and, he thought, just a little bit crazy from the heat. He leaned heavily on the little speeder’s controls, too tired to hold himself upright, as he guided the small craft over the dips and hills on the endless sand fields of Jakku.  
  
Having hit his head, Poe was still having trouble remembering the details shortly before and after the TIE fighter had crashed into the desert, but there had been no time for him to gather his thoughts. With no sign of the renegade stormtrooper Finn, Poe had wandered off from the burning wreckage in an amnesiac daze. Shortly, he had run into a Blarina scavenger called Naka Iit with whom he’d struck up an unlikely partnership – but only after Naka had established that nothing on the crazy, thirsty human staggering alone in the desert would be worth scavenging.  
  
Poe considered it a stroke of luck that Naka subscribed to the Blarina belief that good fortune would come to those who lent their aid to the mad. Naka also happened to find the sun-addled human to be an amusing distraction. As a result, the scavenger had agreed to help Poe get to a place he called Blowback Town where another Blarina could help him get offworld. Low on options, this suited Poe very well. He would have been ready to negotiate with just about anyone who could understand him if there was the slightest chance of getting in touch with the Resistance and to pursue his objective number one: _find BB-8_.  
  
How much time had lapsed between Poe’s capture by the First Order, his escape with the help of the courageous stormtrooper and meeting the Blarina scavenger was anybody’s guess. It could have been days, it could have been a few hours or it could have been anything in between. The very real possibility of death had distorted Poe’s sense of time until it became nothing but background noise as the instinct to survive had taken over.  
  
As he maneuvered the speeder around old, rusted debris peeking out of the dunes, Poe wondered how much of the weight he felt on his shoulders was due to simple fatigue and how much was made up of the failure that had been his mission to Jakku. He’d lost his ship, his gun, his droid, his jacket, his new friend, he’d lost everything except –  
  
_Wait._  
  
Without a word of warning, he decelerated the craft so violently Naka Iit was almost thrown off it. The small scavenger expressed his displeasure with the abrupt stop in what Poe surmised were a few select words in his own tongue. Poe hopped off the speeder, felt around the waist of his pants and found his ticket off the planet: the small button Fox had given him. As Naka continued to curse, Poe yanked the item free and opened it carefully to see the blue circuit inside, perfectly intact. As his Colonel had instructed him, Poe twisted it and closed it quickly. He then heard a faint click from the circuit and then all was silent again, save for Naka’s colorful accusations of insanity.  
  
“I suppose that’s it,” Poe said to himself and slipped the small transmitter in his pocket. Giving into his exhaustion, he sat down on the dune with the sun at his back. He stretched his legs out and leaned back on his hands.  
  
“You really are out of it!” Naka Iit cackled from the speeder. “You were almost making sense a moment ago, my friend, but now I know you to be unwell in the head.”  
  
Poe didn’t bother answering as he waited for rescue, enjoying the way the sand felt between his fingers. He imagined what was happening at the Base at that moment and figured the secrecy of his mission would mean only Fox would receive his transmission. He wondered whether it was night or day on D’Qar and whether the distress signal would reach her in her office or her private quarters.  
  
Poe let out a long breath and raised his eyes to the cloudless sky. The thought of Fox dropping everything to come and get him was enough to convince him not all was yet lost.

* * *

As the hours slowly ticked by, Poe was surprised to note that his Blarina companion hadn’t gone on his way despite his increasingly frustrated threats of doing just that. Naka Iit had resorted to using the entire range of his impressive rhetorical ability to convince the crazy Resistance pilot to climb back on the speeder so they could resume travel. Naka had tried to appeal to Poe’s sense of duty and honor, family waiting at home, and what Poe imagined could be called masculine pride, to no avail.  
  
“Has the sun convinced you that a ship will just pop out of the sky to fetch you, laserbrain?” Naka scoffed as he moved back onto insults.  
  
“Something like that, yes,” Poe admitted truthfully.  
  
The scavenger’s answer was a hiss, which Poe took to convey contempt. He raised his eyes back to the sky and smiled as he saw it was no longer empty.  
  
What first was nothing but a distant speck in the blue sky grew into a lone dark cloud before quickly morphing into Nylah Fox’s Nubian corvette, a most welcome tempest in the arid desert. It circled around Poe and Naka Iit once before it settled down on a fairly flat stretch of sand at the foot of the dune. The ship’s ramp opened and began to lower in wordless invitation.  
  
“Well, my ride has arrived,” Poe announced a bit smugly.  
  
The Blarina had fallen entirely silent after the corvette had come into their full view and was now eyeing the ship and Poe suspiciously.  
  
“Who did you say you were again?” Naka asked, his golden-hued eyes narrowing into slits.  
  
“A pilot in the Resistance,” Poe said, grinning as he stood up slowly and dusted himself off. “It was a pleasure to meet you and to drive your speeder, Naka Iit. I’m afraid we have to part ways a bit sooner than expected.”  
  
“So I see,” Naka said. “Well, Pilot in the Resistance, you go and do whatever it is you and your… curious friends do.”  
  
Poe waved a hand at his short-time traveling companion and jogged down the dune and over to the corvette. When he reached the bottom of the ramp, he expected to see the Colonel waiting for him, but instead he met Lieutenant Mako and felt his smile falter.  
  
“Commander, it’s good to see you in one piece,” the black-haired woman said pleasantly.  
  
“Happy to be in one piece,” Poe answered as he walked up to her. “Is Fox at the command bridge?”  
  
“The Colonel is in her onboard office. Before you see her, you need to go see the medical droid.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“There’s dried blood in your hair and on your face. Fox will just turn you at the door if you show up looking like that.”  
  
“She would, wouldn’t she…” Poe muttered to himself as the ramp closed.  
  
He would have preferred to get the inevitable interrogation with Fox out of the way soon, but he obediently made his way to the ship’s compact medical bay where the droid sat him down to clean his wounds and to administer pain medication. From the way it methodically inspected every scratch on his head, he suspected it would have washed his hair as well if he’d complained about it being dirty.  
  
As the droid finished cleaning a cut on his face, Poe heard the ship’s engines hum to life and took it as a sign not to keep Fox waiting. As he made his way through the corvette, admiring its Nubian design, he stopped to say hello to the small squad of soldiers Fox had again brought with her.  
  
“We were a bit disappointed there was no action for us this time,” the squad leader said.  
  
“My apologies,” Poe replied as he shook the man’s hand. “I’ll leave some for you next time.”  
  
“We’ll appreciate the gesture. Fox is just down that hallway, I think she’s waiting for you. Just look for the door with the red light on it.”  
  
Unsure why he felt so agitated, Poe trudged to the door and was about to ask to be let in when the light changed from red to green and the door slid open. As he stepped inside the onboard office, he heard Fox tell the ship’s captain to take off.  
  
Poe decided to announce his presence by blurting out: “Commander Dameron, reporting for duty.”  
  
Fox was seated at a small desk, looking at a monitor. Her hair was simply yet carefully coiffed in a knot and her dark blue uniform had no hint of wrinkles or dirt. Poe felt like the stark opposite of her with his grimy hair and dirty clothes. He also thought she looked just a little too neat, given the circumstances of their meeting.  
  
“Commander,” she greeted him as she rose from her seat, still keeping her eyes on the monitor. “Who’s your strange friend?”  
  
“My friend?”  
  
“The Blarina who was outside.”  
  
“Oh, him. That was Naka Iit. We were traveling together.”  
  
“Why didn’t you just contact me immediately?” she asked, giving him a scrutinizing once-over from head to toe. “Have a seat, Dameron.”  
  
“Because I hit my head pretty hard,” Poe sighed as he walked to vacant chair on the other side of the desk and sat down. “I couldn’t remember my own name for a moment.”  
  
“What can you remember, then?”  
  
Everything that was important. As Fox walked back and forth in the room, Poe started from his landing in the village of Tuanul and the meeting with Lor San Tekka, occasionally back-tracking to elaborate on a detail. Fox was particularly curious about the attack on the village and asked several questions about the numbers of the First Order troops, Kylo Ren, and whether Poe thought any of the villagers had managed to escape.  
  
“And from there it went as well as you can expect these excursions to First Order vessels to go,” Poe said sardonically. “They strapped me to a lovely interrogation rack, tortured me, asked the same questions over and over…”  
  
Fox stopped her pacing to stare at a spot on the floor, her back towards Poe.  
  
“They tortured you?” she asked, with what Poe thought was a slight strain in her voice.  
  
“They did,” he said matter-of-factly. “I kept my mouth shut. That is until that bastard Kylo Ren – ”  
  
“Are you alright?” she interrupted him.  
  
“I’m fit for duty,” Poe stated quickly and almost got up from his seat in an effort to prove it.  
  
Fox whipped around to face him, looking what Poe could only describe as absolutely furious.  
  
“Is _that_ why you think I am asking?” she said in a voice as cold as ice.  
  
“Isn’t that what concerns you? As a Commanding Officer?” Poe snapped back, refusing to balk at her sudden anger.  
  
“You just said that you were _tortured_. That they strapped you to a rack and _tortured you_.”  
  
Fox’s eyes were bright with a kind of rage he had never seen in her before. He had witnessed moments and glimpses of annoyance or dissatisfaction, but they had been nothing like the red-hot fury that she seemed to blaze with now. And she seemed determined to give Poe a taste of it.  
  
“Every time I send someone out, I’m putting that person in danger,” she snarled as she strode back behind her desk. “Do you think I enjoy it? That I all I care about is results? I care _deeply_ for my agents – and _you should know that by now!_ ”  
  
Poe opened his mouth to tell her had their situation been reversed, he would have been the first on the ground, would have run to meet her halfway on the sand but couldn’t find the right words. He wanted to have the argument – if only to let out some of the steam that had accumulated between his ears starting from the moment Kylo Ren had struck Lor San Tekka down.  
  
But the way Fox’s voice had cracked a little towards the end of her tirade took the fight from him. In turn, his lack of response seemed to have a similar effect on Fox who sighed, her shoulders slumping from their defiant stance.  
  
“You say you were tortured,” she said after a moment, emphasizing each word. “That is _my_ fault, Dameron. That you had to go through that is on _me_.”  
  
Poe sat in a shamed silence, embarrassed about his indirect accusations of callousness. Wanting to apologize, he mulled over the words in his head but the moment passed as Fox sank into her chair and covered her face with her hand.  
  
“ _’Fit for duty’_ ,” she muttered darkly.  
  
The ship’s intercom rattled. “Colonel?”  
  
“Yes?” she answered.  
  
“We’re out of Jakku’s orbit and ready to head back to Base,” said Captain Roskin. “Requesting permission to jump to light speed.”  
  
“Let’s go then.”  
  
Although there were no windows in Fox’s office, Poe could almost see the stars stretch until the ship settled into a steady hypercruise. He wasn’t sure whether Fox wanted him to leave or whether she still wanted to hear the details of his escape. It was cool inside the ship and as a chill came over him, he realized he missed his old jacket.  
  
“I’m alright right now,” Poe said eventually. “I visited the medical droid and I’m all patched up. Tired and sore but other than that I’m fine. Truly.”  
  
She nodded stiffly. “What were you saying about Kylo Ren?”  
  
“He knows BB-8 has the information about Luke Skywalker,” Poe said. “He used the Force to pull BB-8’s location from me.”  
  
“And where is the droid now?” she asked tiredly.  
  
“I don’t know. But we must find it.”  
  
“I agree,” Fox said. “We’ll figure out a way to do that as soon as we get to Base.” She glanced at him quickly. “So what happened to your jacket?”  
  
Poe smiled sheepishly. “Go on, say you were right. I did take it off although I swore I wouldn’t.”  
  
He thought he saw the corner of Fox’s mouth twitch a little. “Just one more thing for now. _How_ did you escape?”  
  
“I stole a Special Forces TIE fighter with the help of a stormtrooper called Finn.”  
  
Fox looked like she was about to ask just how hard Poe had hit his head.  
  
“It’s what happened, Fox,” he insisted. “He… _helped me_. I think he was just as desperate to get out of there as I was.”  
  
“And where is this stormtrooper now?”  
  
Poe shrugged, his dark mood returning. “I don’t know what happened to him. I tried to find him but I was pretty out of it. And, anyway… there was no answer to my call.”  
  
When Fox’s face showed nothing but tired disappointment, Poe requested to be dismissed. When she relented, he left without a word and, as the door shut behind him, he felt he had left something unfinished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor darlings are having trouble communicating. Maybe that will change in the next chapter...
> 
> Naka Iit is a character from The Force Awakens novelization.
> 
> 60 kudos! I am touched, flattered and happy.
> 
> My beta already owns my soul.


	6. Ad Astra

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the stars.

Poe wondered if everyone could sense the tense atmosphere on the ship or whether it was just in his head. He had tried to relax by playing Dejarik with Commander Rahvin, the leader of Fox’s squad, but just couldn’t focus. His thoughts kept drifting back to BB-8, his imagination conjuring up a myriad of different scenarios of what had happened to the droid, where it was, and what had become of the map it was carrying.  
  
Poe wasn’t the type to give into wishful thinking, but his instinct told him BB-8 was simply too resourceful and independent to be stuck on Jakku anymore. The tiny astromech was more likely to steal a freighter on its own than to get caught by the First Order.  
  
BB-8 and the map, however, were not the only things on Poe’s mind. He hadn’t seen Fox since their debriefing, which had spiraled into a heated if short argument. He tried not to dwell on the confrontation or how out of line his remarks had been. Still, even as one his holographic pieces was hit over the head by one of Rahvin’s, Poe’s mind kept wandering down the hallway to where Fox undoubtedly sat in her office. Knowing her, she was probably busy coming up with some sort of plan for their next steps. When Poe lost his fourth game in a row, he decided to call it quits, have something to eat and get some much-needed rest.  
  
He jerked awake from his nap when Rahvin shook him by the shoulder.  
  
“We’ll arrive at the Base in the next few minutes,” he said. “I’d suggest you gather your things, but I don’t think you brought anything except the clothes on your back.”  
  
As Poe made his way to the ship’s main entrance, located on the lower level of the corvette, he heard Fox speaking with Mako. When the Colonel noticed him, she greeted him curtly and told the Lieutenant they would continue the discussion later. Here the engines were louder and by the sound they were making, Poe could tell the ship was descending vertically.  
  
When it finally reached the ground and the ramp began descending, Poe decided to open his mouth. He took a step toward Fox to tell her –  
  
“Colonel!”  
  
Poe looked up to see Major Brance, dressed in his brown uniform, run up to Fox as soon as the ramp had opened enough. He leaned in close to her, speaking quickly in a hushed voice. Whatever it was, it must have been urgent. Fox nodded and they set off to the Command Center, almost at a run, with Lieutenant Mako following closely.  
  
Annoyed with having missed the chance to speak with Fox, Poe walked down the ramp to the bright sunlight, shielding his eyes. With no warning, he felt Jessika Pava smack into him with all her weight.  
  
“Poe, you ass!” she exclaimed, ruffling his hair. “You didn’t go to Yavin 4!”  
  
“Nope,” he said and pulled Jessika into a one-armed hug. “Sorry about lying but you know… classified.”  
  
“You’re picking up words from Fox,” she said, smacking his chest. “You’d best hurry if you want to freshen up and get changed. I have a feeling we’ll be ordered into our X-wings soon.”  
  
“What’s going on?”  
  
In Jessika’s words, the Resistance’s long-distance scanners had picked up readings that had made General Organa do an incredulous double take. The Millenium Falcon, thought long lost, had re-emerged, without any warning or explanation, before vanishing into hyperspace. Its last known coordinates before the jump put the freighter close to Jakku. The news had been so unexpected, they had spread from the Command Center within a matter of minutes.  
  
Still, Poe knew there had to be something else at work as well. While he understood why most of the members of the Resistance would be excited to hear about the Falcon’s sudden reappearance, it didn’t explain why Brance had fetched Fox to the Command Center immediately after her return. Whatever it was, Poe wanted to be prepared.  
  
”Hey, Snipes!” Poe called out to the old mechanic who had walked up to the corvette with his tools. “Can you help me get an astromech for the Black One?”

* * *

Jessika’s “I told you so” face was a work of art, of that Poe had no doubt.  
  
Several hours after returning to D’Qar, Poe found himself very snug and very bored in his X-wing’s cockpit. He was accompanied by the droid Snipes had found for him, and his squadrons, Blue and Red. Just as Jessika had predicted, all the Resistance’s X-wing pilots had been called to a mission briefing where Leia Organa had ordered them to patrol the Jakku system and the two neighboring systems in tight two-squadron groups. Their mission was to stay on the lookout for anything suspicious while maintaining something the General had called “readiness to respond to any sudden developments”.  
  
It wasn’t the first time she had ordered her forces to do something because she seemed to know something no one else did. No one had questioned her, certainly not Poe.  
  
Yet, in all honesty, he had expected more from the briefing. From the brooding look he had seen on Fox’s face in the Command Center’s main conference room, Poe suspected they hadn’t heard everything yet. She’d glanced once in his direction but to his disappointment the veil that had lifted momentarily before his departure to Jakku was back between them. As the X-wings left the Base, he’d silently hoped Fox would have contacted him to at least tell him to behave himself.  
  
Poe let out a drawn out breath. It had been _hours_ , more than he cared to count. His initially energetic and talkative co-pilots had gone quiet after Poe had given them his permission to rest their eyes as their droids took care of the flying. Despite his experience of long outer space flights, Poe still found the deafening silence just a little disturbing. The only sounds he could hear were his own breathing and the groaning of his chair as he shifted a little every now and then, hoping to get more circulation to his legs.  
  
After a long stretch of time without a word, his borrowed astromech made a concerned sound.  
  
“It’s alright, R4. It’s warm enough in here,” he said, trying to reassure the droid.  
  
He had made idle chitchat with the droid but found his laughter a bit too forced for his own liking. Still, Poe didn’t want it to think it was doing a bad job. Immediately after takeoff, R4 had fine-tuned the Black One’s settings following his detailed instructions. The droid was sensitive to his wishes and would occasionally ask if there was something the pilot wanted done.  
  
He had met many astromechs ever since he had started flying with them, first in training and later as a Starfleet cadet and pilot. While he knew droids didn’t, _couldn’t_ form emotional attachments, he had noticed most seemed to prefer a fairly steady companionship with a single pilot. Poe could only surmise R4 wanted something like that for itself as well. It was a good astromech. That much was clear.  
  
It simply wasn’t BB-8.  
  
Poe’s relationship with the orange-and-white droid rivaled his closest friendships, although BB-8’s inner workings were still something of a mystery to him. The little astromech could be strangely childish and often seemed to get lost in its own head, completely engrossed in computations Poe couldn’t begin to follow. It habitually displayed such expressive and, sometimes, unpredictable behavior that Poe had begun to wonder whether somewhere along the line its engineer had accidentally created a machine with a soul.  
  
He sure hoped to see his BB-8 again.  
  
Exhaling abruptly, Poe reached for the comms unit of his X-wing to connect to the most secure line he knew and listened as it opened.  
  
1, 2, 3… he counted, smiling to himself in the knowledge that the person he hoped to reach would be up to receive any unexpected reports with minimal delay.  
  
“Commander?”  
  
Slightly altered by the faint rattle in the connection, yet it was unmistakably the slightly drowsy voice of Colonel Fox. Poe had meant to make a joke to start the conversation and get on her nerves a little bit, trusting it would wake them both up. He had thought of many clever comments as the hours ticked by, and he certainly wasn’t going to let them go to waste.  
  
Now that Fox was actually listening at the other end, Poe realized he couldn’t think of anything to say.  
  
“I…” he began but trailed off, feeling stupid.  
  
“Dameron?”  
  
“I’m here,” he answered, surprised by how despondent his own voice was.  
  
“Is something wrong?” She sounded more alert then.  
  
“No, everything’s fine. It’s silent as the plains of Hoth out here, it’s just…” He sighed, racking his brain for something to tell her. “I think a crucial part of my body went numb somewhere between the Ileenium system and now.”  
  
He cringed. _Brilliant, Dameron._ That really was worth her time.  
  
“I’ll make sure to put that down in my report for General Organa,” she answered dryly but, to his relief, Poe could hear the hint of a smile in her voice. “Have you behaved yourself out there?”  
  
Poe felt his eyebrows rise of their own accord. “Not entirely.”  
  
“…What did you do?”  
  
“I may have tried a couple of maneuvers,” he teased her. “Flying the TIE fighter gave me all sorts of ideas.”  
  
She laughed. “More super sonic dives? The Base still hasn’t recovered from the one you did over the lake.”  
  
“You flatter me, Colonel,” he said, grinning.  
  
But as much as he would have wanted to keep the banter up – if simply as a guise to talk to her – Poe wasn’t in the mood for it.  
  
“Okay, I lied,” he admitted. “Something is the matter.”  
  
“I thought as much. Let’s hear it, Dameron.”  
  
“I’m not exactly jumping for joy just sitting here, doing nothing,” he said, but there was no real bite to his tone.  
  
“I don’t like the waiting either,” she said gently.  
  
“I’m just worried about BB-8. What if the map is already – ”  
  
“I have several recon officers as well as other contacts and lookouts with their eyes peeled for any sign of your droid,” Fox said sternly. “We will find BB-8.”  
  
He fell silent again, lost in thought.  
  
“If it was up to me, I’d be out there myself,” Fox continued. “But my place is here, at the Base.”  
  
“Why did you leave the field?” he asked without thinking. “Sorry. Sorry! Ma’am, I apologize, it’s not my place to ask that.”  
  
Fox’s story was something of a Resistance mystery. Like most people, Poe had heard the basics as soon as the topic of Colonel Fox had come up in a conversation without any commanding officers within earshot. It was common knowledge that before taking over the Resistance’s Recon Unit, Fox had been a covert agent focused on high-risk missions – and she had been damn good at it for a time. At least up until the point she had been brought back to the Base on a floating gurney, barely alive and with a nasty gash across her cheek. After the medical droids were done patching her up, she had walked out of the medical bay with a brace on her leg and a cane in her hand, having vehemently refused the option of a mechno-leg.  
  
That was where consistency ended and where conjecture began.  
  
What exactly had happened to her varied depending on who was telling the story, its elements ranging from the undeniably epic – her hijacking an Imperial class Star Destroyer was Poe’s favorite – to the downright mundane – her falling down face first on some stairs as a clumsy recruit. What the stories did have in common was the endnote. The storyteller would eventually trail off, shrug or wave a hand dismissively before saying: “But everyone thinks only the General knows what really happened to Fox.”  
  
And no one was about to walk up to Leia Organa and ask why Fox had never gone back to the field – except now Poe Dameron had asked that very question from the Colonel herself. He wanted to hit his head on something, _hard_. He felt like a right idiot, to encroach on a topic that must have been too personal for her to even consider sharing –  
  
“There was an explosion,” Fox said. “Well, a series of explosions.”  
  
He’d been prepared to continue apologizing but the words died in his throat.  
  
“There was also a nasty scuffle,” she continued. From the shuffling sound, Poe could tell she had probably sat down. “But it’s a bit of a long story, and not entirely happy at that.”  
  
“I’ve got time,” Poe suggested cautiously. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced in his cockpit, hoping she would continue, fearing the blow of a declining answer.  
  
After a moment, she spoke again. “You know that I used to be a field agent – like Obatu Wolke?”  
  
“Yeah, I know,” Poe answered, leaning back in his seat.  
  
“My duties were much the same. Travel, track, infiltrate, gather intel, survive, repeat. Seven years ago, I was still doing that. At the time, the relatively young Resistance had run into several setbacks despite the support from the New Republic. Lost freighters, stolen cargo, and people just went missing, that sort of thing.”  
  
“First Order?” Poe prompted.  
  
“Who else?” Fox said. “The problem was that we didn’t know much beyond that. There were always plenty of clues but they seemed to lead us in circles. A seemingly solid lead would result in the trail going cold somewhere in the Outer Rim. Whenever we thought we’d made a big break, we would arrive to find nothing.”  
  
“Like they already knew our movements,” Poe supplied.  
  
“Exactly. I had just returned to Base from yet another one of those wild bantha chases. I heard that a friend of mine, another agent, was there as well. He… had been behaving _strangely_ lately which had aroused my suspicions so I went looking for him. I found him gazing at the night sky on a hill.”  
  
Poe let his eyes close as he listened to the cadence of Fox’s voice. He had a feeling the story was headed somewhere very personal.  
  
“My friend eventually told me he was leaving on a mission and that he might not come back. He was… drunk and on the verge of crying which did nothing to assuage my fears. I bid him goodnight and hid myself in the ship I knew he would leave in. I desperately hoped to prove myself wrong. But, after a series of hyperspace jumps, we landed on Anoth, at a First Order base. It was so new you could smell it.”  
  
“Caraya’s soul,” Poe breathed in disbelief. “What happened then?”  
  
“I tailed him and the First Order operatives he’d met with to an underground bunker… and listened as he told them _all_ he knew about Leia Organa’s ship and its whereabouts at the time. I immediately sent out a coded message to tell my commanding officer what I’d discovered. But I had no time to wait for help to arrive so… I acted.”  
  
The fact that both Leia Organa and the Resistance still survived told Poe everything he needed to know. Fox must have somehow wreaked enough havoc to stop the plan to kill Leia Organa – while managing to come out at the other end alive.  
  
“It’s amazing what a few hurriedly installed panels can do when you rig them to explode,” Fox said, sounding almost amused.  
  
“What happened to the double agent?”  
  
“I killed him,” she confessed. “He did manage to slash my face before I got my hands around his neck.”  
  
“Did he tell you why he betrayed the Resistance?”  
  
There was a lengthy pause before she replied, her voice entirely colorless. “I didn’t give him a chance to explain.”  
  
Poe processed her answer, trying to imagine himself in the situation she had faced, staring down a friend who had betrayed her and their common purpose.  
  
“Do you think I’m a monster?” Fox whispered.  
  
“I think you are a protector, Fox,” Poe said softly.  
  
“You really think that?”  
  
“ _Yes_.”  
  
Poe imagined Fox was probably in the Recon Center, surrounded by its blue lights and holograms. Perhaps one or two of her Lieutenants were present but soundly asleep at their stations while Fox took care of the long night shift. Maybe a few strands of hair had escaped her carefully arranged knot. She might have opened the top button on her dark blue uniform – like on that sweltering hot day at the Base when she had admired her beautiful corvette, a wistful look in her eyes. The imagined scene pleasantly reflected Poe’s own current situation with his co-pilots fast asleep in their X-wings.  
  
He could imagine it so vividly it was almost like being in the Blue Room with her.  
  
“How did you escape?” Poe asked.  
  
“I don’t really remember the details,” Fox sighed. “I know that Leia Organa sent the Resistance fleet to destroy what was left of the First Order base. She later told me I was found unconscious on the burning compound. I probably passed out on my way to the nearest undamaged ship, dragging my injured leg.”  
  
“Who was the agent?”  
  
“Someone I thought I knew.”  
  
“How did you come to suspect him?”  
  
“It was the little things. He stopped greeting the mechanics, he stopped talking about the future… I know my agents better than their families do, Poe. I know how they take their caf, who they are sleeping with, who they love. If one of them ever thinks to betray us, I _will_ know it before they know it themselves. I will not allow anything like Anoth happen again.”  
  
“I know,” Poe said, staring at the empty black space, processing the fact that she had just called him by his first name. “It won’t happen again. Fox, I – ”  
  
R4 beeped to inform Poe that his fellow pilots were slowly waking up in their X-wings.  
  
“Time for us to get back to work,” Fox said, sounding more like the Colonel again.  
  
“Alright. Talk to you later,” Poe said softly, reluctant to end their conversation.  
  
“Commander. Fox out.”  
  
The silence returned and while it hardly sounded any better than it had before he had contacted her, Poe felt a little less lonely. As he let his eyes sweep over the brilliant stars overhead, he wondered whether instead of Colonel Fox, he’d had a lengthy talk with Nylah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll be back to Fox's POV in the next one. Thank you for reading!
> 
> This chapter wouldn't be here without my beta's help. Thank you, darling.


	7. The Forces at Work

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Fox has a conversation with Leia and Poe shoots down TIE fighters on Takodana.

Faraway from Poe Dameron, the night was still and calm in the Recon Center. Fox was seated at her large monitor, contemplating the significance of having just told the pilot what had happened on Anoth. The events had determined much of her life since then, from the ever-present brace on her leg to her commitment to safeguard the Resistance the best she could.  
  
Still, Fox had never sought validation for her actions from anyone else than Leia Organa. As a result, Fox thought that perhaps she should have been at least somewhat alarmed by the pressing need to answer Poe’s question truthfully. The time for such considerations was long gone, however. Something more powerful was at work. She had feared it as she’d sent Poe to Jakku. She most certainly had considered the possibility as her corvette had accelerated to hyperspace to pull him from the desert, with her pulse an unsteady staccato against her throat.  
  
In her line of work, Fox had learned that sometimes the truth revealed itself in sinister installations like the base she had discovered. Other times, it came out in private whispers that nonetheless carried across the vastness of the galaxy, spelling out even the best-kept secrets.  
  
Telling him what had happened on Anoth spoke of a stubborn truth: that something had taken root in her heart – and that she had no choice over the matter. Fox had been a soldier too long not to recognize when her position was hopeless.  
  
“Alright then,” Fox murmured in defeat.  
  
“Evening, Nylah,” a voice said behind her.  
  
“General!” Fox shot up from her chair and swore under her breath when she stumbled slightly.  
  
Leia Organa waved her hand dismissively as she made her way to Fox. Leia glanced at her knee briefly but, to Fox’s relief, said nothing about it.  
  
“On second thought, perhaps I ought to say ‘goodnight’,” Leia continued mischievously, eyeing Mako and Kell who were slumped over their stations. “Let’s keep our voices down to avoid waking your exhausted Lieutenants.”  
  
Fox wondered uneasily how long Leia had been there and whether she had heard any of the conversation she’d had with Poe. Although Leia usually commanded immediate attention in any room she entered, she often moved so carefully people would notice her only after she said something. It was a habit or a quirk of hers that Fox had guessed to be every bit as intentional as her choice to forego her royal title. The fact that this time she had managed to sneak up on her Colonel, the Resistance’s former master infiltrator, spoke equally of Leia’s roguish skill and of Fox’s distracted state of mind.  
  
Like Fox, the General looked like she had been up all night. While her hair was still arranged in an elaborate braid crown, her eyes looked a little tired and her presence had taken on a more gentle edge, which Fox had long ago learned to convey a wish to dispend with unnecessary decorum.  
  
“How are our brave pilots?” Leia asked, glancing at Fox’s monitor, which showed the Black One was currently in mint condition. Fox had brought the image up as Poe had contacted her, sounding morose, and had promptly forgotten to put it away.  
  
She found it a little curious that Leia asked about the pilots from her. The ongoing mission was technically not under Fox’s command and Leia could have well asked Admiral Ackbar or Major Brance, who doubtlessly were on duty in the Command Center. Fox decided to play along, curious about Leia’s true intentions.  
  
Recalling Poe’s quip about having lost feeling in a crucial part of his body, Fox chuckled.  
  
“Dameron checked in a moment ago,” she said. “I gathered he was feeling a bit uncomfortable in his X-wing.”  
  
“Cracking jokes, then,” Leia said, smiling crookedly. “I had a talk with him before he left with his squadrons. He complained about the fighter. Not the ship itself, but he’s not a fan of the flight computer.”  
  
“Oh?” Fox prompted, trying not to sound overly interested.  
  
“He says it ‘gets in the way’.”  
  
“Keeps him alive, more like.”  
  
“‘Overzealous _babysitter_ ’,” Leia continued, sounding highly amused. “At least I think that was the expression he used.”  
  
Every single person who had ever even heard of Poe’s skills knew he was perfectly capable of controlling his X-wing. But the almost devil-may-care attitude apparent in some of his maneuvers was enough to turn Fox’s stomach. She had known pilots who tested the limits and some who broke them. Then there were the truly rare ones who flew beyond the limits, refusing to be bound by concepts like their own mortality.  
  
“He flies like a man who thinks he could simply be replaced,” Fox said, realizing the truth of it. “Like he’s expendable.”  
  
“He flies like a young man at the peak of his ability and confidence,” Leia said gently, watching Fox with a motherly look. “Trust me. I would know. I’ve dealt with two of them.”  
  
“General Solo is the luckiest pilot I have ever heard of,” Fox argued, knowing Leia wouldn’t take offense. “And Master Luke has the Force on his side.”  
  
“And the Commander doesn’t?” Leia countered lightly.  
  
Fox made a sound of acknowledgement low in her throat as she considered Leia’s words. Despite working under her nearly half her life, Fox had never given the Force much thought, considering it to belong to the realm of the Jedi. As she’d compiled the background document on Poe, Fox had discovered that he had grown in a home with a Force-sensitive tree close by. It had been a gift to the Dameron family from Luke Skywalker himself for their tireless effort in the war against the Empire.  
  
Perhaps Poe had played in its shade as a child or had taken lazy afternoon naps under it, unknowingly receiving a share of the tree’s power.  
  
She also knew Poe had visited his father on Yavin 4 after he had decided to join the Resistance. Had he gone to the tree to run his fingers over its bark before bidding goodbye to his family? Had the tree sensed Poe was going to somewhere dangerous and wanted to protect him?  
  
“The Force has many ways, Nylah,” Leia said. “And there’s more than a touch of the Force within us all.”  
  
At a loss, Fox let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding.  
  
Turning to leave, Leia reached out and touched her shoulder gently. “I wouldn’t worry so much about Poe Dameron. Try to get some rest, Nylah. Goodnight.”  
  
“General,” Fox responded and listened until she could no longer hear Leia’s footsteps.  
  
She stared at the shape of the Black One on her monitor and mulled over the two conversations she’d had. There seemed to be no hiding from her own feelings – or Leia’s astute observations. While the General had not outright asked her whether her relationship with Commander Dameron had developed into a certain direction, Fox was sure Leia had her suspicions. What she would do with them would remain to be seen.  
  
Meanwhile, there was the matter of Poe’s complaints about the flight computer. If there was no way to get Poe to fly safer, Fox could help him fly _better_.  
  
Time to call in that favor, she thought and reached for her private comms unit. The reputation of the character she hoped to contact didn’t exactly hold up under any kind of scrutiny, but the Toydarian had ways to procure rare items and deliver them quickly even on short notice.  
  
“Who is it?” a gruff voice answered.  
  
“It’s me,” Fox said. “How fast can you get me a master bypass chip for the flight computer of a T-70 X-wing?”

* * *

Fox’s intelligence network stretched far across the galaxy to some of the most unlikely places. Her lone agents formed her Unit’s elite, while her recon officers, of whom some traveled while others stayed at the Base, supported the agents and kept track of the intel they gathered.  
  
But Fox hadn’t stopped there. She also had several informants scattered across the galaxy, siphoned from the connections the Rebel Alliance and the Resistance had made over the decades. While most of them represented the more questionable types that roamed the star systems, they often provided her with bits of information that tipped the scales in the Resistance’s favor.  
  
Slightly before dawn, Fox’s network proved its usefulness yet again. G4-97, a decommissioned old droid stationed on Takodana, sent an encrypted signal to the Recon Center. It reported having just sighted the one designated BB-8 in Maz Kanata’s castle. And not only had G4 spotted the most wanted droid in the galaxy, it also reported that BB-8 was accompanied by Han Solo, a young woman dressed in desert clothing, and a young man wearing a leather jacket.  
  
That BB-8 was found on neutral territory entailed both good and bad news. Theoretically, fetching the droid would be rather straightforward and none of the locals of Takodana would bat an eye. However, Fox knew there was no telling who else had spotted the droid.  
  
She woke her Lieutenants with a shout, telling them to alert the General and call the rest of the Recon team in from their beds. Fox then rushed to the Command Center to inform Ackbar of the sudden development, and the Admiral ordered the X-wings to head for Takodana. As the Base’s team leaders called for their subordinates, the Command Center quickly filled to its full capacity.  
  
C-3PO and Leia, her face deceptively calm, came through the room on their way to her ship, intending to leave for Takodana immediately. Ackbar felt the General’s departure would be an unnecessary risk and strongly opposed it, but Leia was determined to go.  
  
“That little droid has the map to my brother, Admiral,” she said. “I _need_ to be there.”  
  
Just as Leia was about to leave the Command Center, the Resistance’s scanners detected an incredible surge of energy in the Unknown Regions before a massive beam of light tore through the very fabric of space. Alarms began blaring in the room, creating a mass of confusion.  
  
“What is that?” Brance breathed, stepping away from his flashing monitor in something akin to terror.  
  
“It can’t be…” Leia said, covering her mouth with her hand.  
  
Fox froze. On her return from Jakku, Brance had told her that an urgent transmission had come in from one of her agents. The mangled, barely discernible hologram face of Cass Vektra had reported there was _something big_ beyond the Outer Rim, something she had not been able to investigate further without compromising herself. Cass hadn’t contacted the Base since, which had led Fox to fear her very best had been captured, perhaps killed.  
  
The latter option was more likely, as Cass would never have allowed herself to be taken alive.  
  
But there were more pressing matters at hand than the fate of a single agent. Whatever Cass had been trying to uncover had just torn a hole to where the Hosnian system and the seat of the New Republic command had been only a moment ago.  
  
“It’s all gone,” Brance said as the alarms died down and the room filled with an eerie silence.  
  
“After all this time, they’ve made another one,” Leia said cryptically, swaying on her feet. “Alderaan alone was too much. Now _this_. So much death. We need to find out for sure.”  
  
“Admiral, I request one X-wing for an immediate recon flight to the Unknown Regions,” Fox said numbly.  
  
Ackbar nodded. “Take the Blue Squadron’s Temmin Wexley. He’s one of the best.”  
  
“Thank you, Ackbar,” Fox said and turned on her heels to stride back to the Recon Center where she told Mako to give Wexley his new orders.  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Mako said in a shaky voice.  
  
Fox flicked on the intercom so communication between the Blue Room and Command Center would go more smoothly.  
  
“Everyone, focus!” Fox barked, hoping to shake people, including herself, out of the shock.  
  
“C’mon, 3PO,” Leia said with renewed determination in her voice and set off once again to her ship. “We’ve got work to do.”  
  
“More information coming in from G4-97,” Mauvi said. “A group of First Order ships have just emerged from hyperspace at Takodana’s coordinates! G4’s scanners are picking up TIE fighters in the orbit.”  
  
“Have you detected other enemy ships?” Fox asked.  
  
“A larger ship is approaching as well,” Mauvi said. “We’re trying to get some sort of read on it from here. Could be a shuttle.”  
  
“Ackbar, how long until the X-wings reach Takodana?” Leia asked through her portable comms unit, sounding a bit winded.  
  
“A while more but it’ll be too long,” Ackbar answered. “We’re in for a fight. They have more fighters than we do. We need to surprise them somehow.”  
  
Ackbar turned to a young cadet. “Bring up a map of the area!”  
  
A green hologram appeared at the center of the conference room, illuminating the faces of the people gathering around it. A brief silence fell as the commanding officers examined the geography of Takodana: lush terrain with rolling hills and glittering lakes. Maz Kanata’s ancient castle sat by a particularly large body of water.  
  
“Could the X-wings do a low altitude approach?” Fox piped up, peering at the map through the Recon Center’s panorama window.  
  
“How low?” Brance asked, looking back at her.  
  
“Just barely above the lake. There’s your element of surprise.”  
  
“The Colonel is right,” Ackbar confirmed. “TIE fighters have trouble scanning low-flying targets. Our squadrons could start their approach on the other side of the lake in an arrow-shaped formation. Once they build enough speed, the TIE fighters will never see them coming.”  
  
“Let’s do it, then,” the General said. “My ship will jump to hyperspace the second it leaves the atmosphere. Admiral, relay the plan to Commander Dameron at once. Give him full authority to attack as soon as the X-wings reach Takodana.”

* * *

The First Order forces didn’t know what had hit them.  
  
Feeling secure in their apparent victory, most of the First Order pilots had set down their ships near Maz Kanata’s destroyed castle. Before any of them had managed to scramble back to their ships and answer the Resistance’s challenge, their fighters had been reduced to burning lumps of metal by the relentless attack of the X-wings.  
  
Squeezing her cane, Fox stood in the Recon Center. The comms activity between the Resistance pilots was broadcast loudly in the Command Center, and it carried all the way to the Blue Room.  
  
Naturally, Poe reveled in the thick of the battle. Between bold verbal challenges at the airborne enemy fighters, he gave quick and efficient orders to his squadrons. He seemed keen to finish the battle as soon as possible to keep the First Order on the defensive and to avoid any X-wings being shot down. Fox’s thoughts were confirmed when Jessika Pava’s fighter shot after the retreating First Order shuttle. Poe sharply ordered her to return to the safety of the Blue Squadron.  
  
Fox had to hand it to him. Although she wasn’t convinced it was necessary for him to chase down so many TIE fighters on his own, his absolute control over the battle – despite Wexley’s absence – made it look like it had not even been a challenge for him. She smiled as she watched the Black One’s telemetry figures race across her monitor. The fighter did incredibly tight loops and turns, taking down enemy ships and troopers one after another without wasting a single energy burst.  
  
“Where is the droid?” Ackbar said, as the last of the First Order ships escaped in the wake of the black shuttle.  
  
There was an anxious moment where everyone in the Command Center wondered where BB-8 had gone in the fray. According to G4-97, the small astromech had rolled off into the woods after the young woman but it hadn’t seen BB-8 since. Poe was about to set his X-wing down to bolt after his droid, but then BB-8 appeared from the bushes next to Leia’s transport.  
  
“We have BB-8,” Leia reported through her comms link. “We also have some very dear old friends with us. We’ll finish up here and then we’re coming home.”  
  
As cheers erupted in the Command Center and the Blue Room, Admiral Ackbar slumped down onto his chair, feeling the stress of the last few hours dissipate for the moment. Fox threw a smile over her shoulder as her young team jumped from their seats to hug each other in celebration.  
  
“Good job, everyone,” she said over the noise. “Take a breather and then it’s back to work.”  
  
The victory at Takodana was a long overdue positive development, but there was still the matter of the incomprehensibly powerful attack on the Hosnian system and the possible disappearance of Cass Vektra. As much as Fox would have wanted to tackle both mysteries immediately, she knew they had to wait for Wexley’s return. Although she wished the pilot would send them something already, it was safer to maintain absolute radio silence as he investigated the Unknown Regions.  
  
Wexley, however, wasn’t the only X-wing pilot Fox was eager to hear from, but she wasn’t about to admit that to anyone.  
  
As if Poe had sensed her wish, Fox heard the rattle of an opening comms link. She pressed her earpiece in more securely and waited, holding her breath.  
  
Then she heard his voice.  
  
“Did you miss me, Colonel?” Poe asked teasingly.  
  
She smiled. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Black Leader."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The timeline of The Force Awakens is one of the trickiest things I contend with as I write.
> 
> Next up, many happy reunions at the Base. Oh, and Fox has a gift for Poe...
> 
> My beta and brainstorming comrade once again deserves praise and gratitude.


	8. Wrapped in Silence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which many reunions take place.

Fox examined the thin, metallic device under a bright hololamp in her office, turning it over again and again to check it for any imperfections. Meanwhile, her procurer waited for her conclusion over the secure comms line.  
  
“Well?” The Toydarian smuggler asked after a while. “Satisfied?”  
  
“It looks completely unused,” she commented. “Has it at least been tested?”  
  
“It looks unused because it _is_ unused, and yes, it has been tested,” he grunted. “Three astromechs ran diagnostics on it. The thing works. But I have to say I expected you would ask for something a bit more substantial than a bypass chip. Don’t get me wrong, those things don’t exactly fall out of people’s pockets ever since they were practically made illegal in polite space, damn bureaucrats. You thinking of a new career move?”  
  
“And this will allow the pilot to bypass all limitations and presets of the flight computer?” Fox pressed, ignoring the Toydarian’s curiosity.  
  
“Install it and the X-wing becomes another beast entirely,” he confirmed. “The pilot and the astromech can indiscriminately manipulate any feature and function of the ship. All those pesky safety measures? You can forget about them. It’s not irreversible, but if you do take it out, you’ll have to reinstall the flight computer.”  
  
Despite his shifty reputation, the Toydarian had never let Fox down when it came to business. Still, she felt more than a little apprehensive about giving the item to a reckless pilot. With so much risk involved with her usual duties, she was more used to putting up a variety of back-up solutions.  
  
And here I am, about to put my trust in Poe’s raw, unfiltered skill, Fox thought wryly.  
  
“So?” The Toydarian prompted again, sounding impatient. “We’ve got a deal?”  
  
“Sure,” Fox said. “Consider us even.”  
  
“You made this strangely easy, Fox. Let me know if you’d like me to throw in something else.”  
  
“That won’t be necessary, but I’ll keep the offer in mind,” Fox said, getting up from her seat. “Until we speak again.”  
  
“Later,” he said in a long-suffering sigh before she flicked off the connection.  
  
Fox walked around her desk slowly, still gazing at the obsidian dark item, delicately held between her long fingers. She had felt uncharacteristically restless since the bypass chip’s delivery – hidden in plain sight in a box containing an assortment of new electronics for the Recon Center. Every few minutes, she’d kept checking on the X-wings’ progress back to the Base from Takodana, wondering why it seemed to be taking so long. When she’d been able to keep from glancing at her monitors for a full half hour, she’d silently congratulated herself. The thought of the bypass chip sitting in her office burned at the back of her mind as acutely as a good story or joke that she just couldn’t wait to share.  
  
Neither could she resist imagining how Poe would react to the gift. He’d most likely be surprised or even confused at first, but then he’d probably grin, realizing what the item was as he smoothed a finger over it. Maybe he’d tease her about it, inquire playfully why she’d given it to him, in person.  
  
Would he have the patience to wait a moment before trying it in action? Would he see his Colonel differently then? Maybe he’d –  
  
A hesitant knock at the door to her office interrupted her daydreaming.  
  
“Yes?” she said and slipped the chip in her pocket before pressing a button on her desk to open the door.  
  
Numo Ban, fiddling with a datapad, stepped inside. “Excuse me, ma’am. I – I’m not disturbing you, am I?”  
  
“You’re not,” Fox said. “What is it?”  
  
“You requested to be informed about the X-wings’s arrival immediately?”  
  
“I take it they’re here, then,” Fox said, making a mental note to encourage Ban to stop answering so uncertainly it sounded like he was speaking in questions.  
  
“Approaching the landing strip, ma’am. ETA in five minutes.”  
  
“Thank you. Off you go.”  
  
Ban left quickly, probably relieved Fox didn’t press him for any news about Wexley’s progress on his recon flight. When the door closed, she absent-mindedly fixed her hair knot and waited for a few minutes – for appearance’s sake – before she walked out of her office with measuredly unhurried steps. The weight of the bypass chip in her pocket was a pleasant if stupidly self-indulgent sensation, and she looked down to hide a smile as she headed outside.  
  
She joined the large number of Resistance members rushing to the landing strip to receive the General, their pilots, and, of course, the Millenium Falcon. The old freighter, unmistakable among the newer spacecraft, was causing quite a stir among the youngest at the Base.  
  
Although the Falcon was an inspiring sight for anyone who had grown up with tales of the Rebel Alliance, Fox couldn’t help noticing the ship looked a tad worse for wear than the last time she remembered seeing it. Its ramp opened and BB-8 rolled down to the landing strip, doubtlessly looking for the same man as Fox herself. They both looked around, hoping to spot the black X-wing somewhere in the hustle and bustle.  
  
Then a large troop transport was moved aside, revealing the Black One behind it, and Fox had to stop and catch her breath.  
  
Of course she had known Poe would come back, had trusted his skills would keep him safe, had even heard from Numo Ban that the X-wings were indeed about to land at Base. And yet the sheer relief of actually seeing Poe’s ship back in its spot without a mark on it took her by surprise.  
  
As the cockpit opened to reveal Poe and cheers erupted from the crew close by, something warm and bright swelled in Fox’s chest, and her feet began to take her to him. As she approached, he took off his helmet and a bright smile lit up his face as BB-8 sped to him, squealing its greeting. He knelt down to the droid, conversing with it animatedly before he looked up. Recognition dawned on his face, and he ran to embrace a young, dark-skinned man Fox didn’t recognize.  
  
Her feet stopped.  
  
She watched as the men talked happily, obviously delighted to see each other. As she studied the reunion unfolding in the middle of the busy landing strip, she noticed the younger man was wearing what looked distinctly like Poe’s worn leather jacket, the one he’d lost at some point during his failed mission to Jakku. It seemed the man was about to take it off to return it to its owner, but Poe’s response was to pull the jacket back over his shoulder, urging him to accept the gift.  
  
She took in how close to each other the two were standing and how friendly they seemed. Fox raked her brain for who this man could be. A friend Poe hadn’t seen in a long time? Someone he hadn’t spoken about?  
  
At least not to me, Fox thought.  
  
The leather jacket. Based on Poe’s account of his misadventures on Jakku and his capture, Fox had assumed Poe had lost it for good. Now that she thought back on his version of the events, she realized at no point had he said he’d lost it. He’d said he’d taken it off, despite having sworn he wouldn’t – it was _his favorite_.  
  
Perhaps he’d given it to someone who needed it more than him.  
  
She studied the young man wearing the jacket, took in his non-descript pants and boots that looked like the most generic, standard issue military gear imaginable. The stormtrooper who’d helped him escape? Had he survived after all? Fox couldn’t fathom who else Poe might have met and befriended during the mission.  
  
For some time now, she had considered her friendly interactions with Poe to be something entirely different, even special, but as she watched the happy reunion, her naïve hope was thrown into sharp relief.  
  
Poe is the kind of man to make fast friends with everyone, she remembered. He’s the most handsome man in the Resistance, and he’s absolutely _everyone’s_ favorite pilot.  
  
Suddenly, Nylah Fox was convinced there wasn’t a stupider person than her at the Base that day.  
  
The bypass chip felt strangely heavy in her pocket, as if it was mocking her – a commanding officer no less – for walking all the way to the landing strip to personally give her young subordinate such a rare gift. It proved just how severely her judgment had failed.  
  
Hoping Poe hadn’t spotted her, Fox turned and headed back to the Recon Center where she could think again.

* * *

Only Fox’s youngest cadets, Numo Ban and Mauvi, were in the Blue Room to keep an eye on things while her Lieutenants rested and the others, undoubtedly, had run outside for a glimpse of the Falcon – perhaps even Han Solo himself.  
  
“Take a break,” Fox said tersely as she walked in. “I’ll keep watch here.”  
  
The two glanced at each other, perhaps expecting the other would say something, and got up to hurry out.  
  
“Nothing yet from Wexley, ma’am,” Mauvi said on his way out. “We haven’t tried to contact him either.”  
  
Fox nodded in acknowledgement and walked over to her monitor, hoping for a report from one of her field agents so she could stop thinking about Poe Dameron. She stared at a map depicting a rough outline of the Tatooine system and its two suns, trying to ignore how private embarrassment burned on her cheeks.  
  
She couldn’t decide what was worse – that she’d almost gone over to Poe and given him a gift in plain sight of half the Resistance or that she had thought it was a good idea in the first place.  
  
She rubbed her forehead, trying to fight off an impending headache.  
  
As Poe and Fox had talked over her comms line during the X-wings’ long-haul flight, she’d idly wondered why he had contacted her with nothing more to say except that he was anxious. Soon however, the conversation had swept her away, making her forget who he was – and just who she herself was.  
  
With him coaxing her to tell more about the events on Anoth, she had sensed the distance between them shrink until it had felt like she could have reached out across the silence of space to where he was.  
  
Or that’s what she’d almost allowed herself to think. How _stupid_.  
  
She dug the bypass chip out of her pocket and deliberated breaking it in half when an inquisitive beep caught her attention.  
  
“Hello, BB-8,” Fox said, looking down at the little droid who had come into the room without her noticing. “What is it? Shouldn’t you be with your pilot?”  
  
It didn’t answer. For a robot, BB-8 had a remarkably expressive presence, and now it seemed like it wanted to ask her something. Fox also reckoned that with BB-8 in the Recon Center, Poe wouldn’t be far behind. She looked back at the bypass chip – and then at the droid.  
  
“Could you help me with something, BB-8?” Fox asked, as a plan took shape in her mind.  
  
The droid beeped in affirmation.  
  
Kneeling, Fox showed the thin chip to BB-8. “You know what this is?”  
  
The droid made an educated assessment.  
  
“That’s right,” Fox said, smiling. “When this is installed on Poe’s X-wing, he will be able to fly without any interference from the flight computer.”  
  
BB-8 squeaked a hopeful question.  
  
“Yes, you would have control over it as well.”  
  
Still, the little astromech said nothing and didn’t reach out with a metallic arm to take the offered item. Fox recognized the subtle tactic, as she often used it herself to get the whole truth from anyone who seemed insecure – but still had something important to say.  
  
“I need you to install it on the Black One,” she admitted before BB-8 had a chance to press her. “Can you do that for me?”  
  
BB-8’s lens focused, examining the item carefully. With what Fox was tempted to call discretion, it inquired why she wished Poe to have it.  
  
“Because your pilot is… special to me,” Fox confessed, examining the chip again without really seeing it. “Very special, indeed.”  
  
Sweetly, the droid asked why she didn’t want to give it to Poe herself.  
  
“I can’t,” she sighed. “But getting it installed on the Black One is something I can do for him. I don’t need Poe to know who put it there.”  
  
The droid made a morose sound, full of empathy. A small compartment on its side opened and Fox placed the chip inside.  
  
“Thank you, BB-8. Our secret.”  
  
Just as Fox got up from BB-8’s level, Poe arrived in the Recon Center. He was closely followed by the young man Fox had seen him hug on the landing strip. He greeted her with a nod, too polite not to acknowledge her, a little too uncertain to speak to her directly.  
  
“There you are,” Poe said as he laid eyes on the droid. “We wondered where you went off to when I just got you back! We need to show the map to Leia.”  
  
Poe looked from the droid to Fox and, for a brief moment, a bright smile lit up his face. With the Recon Center’s lights illuminating his features, Fox’s attention went to the angry-looking bruise on his cheek, but she chose not to comment on it.  
  
“Hey…” Poe said, looking a little lost before gesturing to the young man. “Uh, this is Finn. He is the stormtrooper who helped me escape. Finn, _this_ is Fox.”  
  
“Nice to meet you, Finn,” Fox said pleasantly, trying not to stare at the jacket he was wearing.  
  
“You too, ma’am,” Finn answered, glancing at the Colonel’s insignia on her chest. He seemed to be brimming with a kind of impatient energy, anxious to move forward from the Recon Center.  
  
Poe seemed to pick up on it. “C’mon, BB-8, we should get going. Everyone’s gathering in the main conference room.”  
  
“Your pilot is right,” Fox said to the droid, nudging it gently when it seemed to want to stay by her side. “Let’s go. I’d like to see the map myself.”  
  
As if remembering its most important mission, BB-8 wheeled around to head for the door. Just as Fox was about to follow the three, her earpiece rattled.  
  
“Wexley?” Fox said, stopping to listen. She was vaguely aware of the two men and the droid straining to hear the conversation.  
  
“Colonel,” Snap Wexley’s voice answered. “Just got out of hyperspace outside D’Qar. Give me a moment and I’ll land at Base. Ma’am, about the Unknown Regions… Your agent was right. You’re not going to believe this, but there _really is something big_ there.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my beta is irreplaceable. <3
> 
> Three chapters left, guys. Next up, Starkiller Base.
> 
> Oh, and more than 80 kudos! ;_; Thank you so much, I didn't think my wee story would get such lovely feedback. It really encourages me to keep on writing this to the end.


	9. The Edge of Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which balancing duties and feelings begins to be too much.

Fox was not happy.  
  
On hearing that the map was incomplete, she swore under her breath and her team let out a collective sigh of disappointment. They had spent considerable time and resources uncovering any lead that would help the Resistance find Luke Skywalker. Fox’s best agent had done nothing but chase rumors for almost two years to finally deliver the news that Lor San Tekka had information about the Jedi Master’s self-imposed exile. During the mission to Jakku, the village of Tuanul and all its residents had been destroyed, and the Resistance’s best pilot had almost been killed.  
  
And what did they have to show for all the trouble and sacrifice? A map that led nowhere.  
  
That, however, was only the beginning of the Resistance’s current problems. Which was why the leadership of the Resistance, other senior officers, pilots and a handful of allies, including Finn and Han Solo, had gathered in the main conference room for an urgent strategy session. Everything Finn had told them about the mysterious weapon hidden in the Unknown Regions was completely supported by the data from Wexley’s recon flight.  
  
The combined knowledge painted a picture of something so malevolent it exceeded even Fox’s worst nightmares.  
  
It was called Starkiller Base. To a truly objective eye, it would have been a wonder of engineering. But while the Resistance’s technical staff was busy arguing amongst themselves how such a massive construct could work at all, only two things mattered to Fox: by consuming stars, it was capable of destroying entire solar systems halfway across the galaxy, and each passing moment meant giving it another chance to do just that.  
  
For the benefit of everyone taking part in the strategy session, a three-dimensional model of Starkiller Base floated in the middle of the room. As everyone took in the challenge ahead of them, Fox swept her gaze over the faces of the people present and saw fear, disgust, and even conflicted awe.  
  
Han Solo’s lined face had a very keen sense of “Here we go again” while Leia looked disbelieving and angry. Admiral Ackbar, on the other hand, looked like a veteran who had been hoping to be done with such adversaries for the longest time already.  
  
At the time of the Rebel Alliance’s war against the Empire, Fox had been a small child and thus had no personal memories of the meetings before the attacks on the Death Stars. She could however imagine that the atmosphere had been similar: anxious, frightened – and yet fully committed to protecting those they cared for the most.  
  
Her eyes settled on Poe. He was leaning on a panel on the opposite side, looking up at the map with a serious expression on his face. Finn stood by his side, appearing markedly calm, although Fox suspected he struggled with the wait to save his friend, the young woman who had been kidnapped on Takodana. Finn’s connection to Poe may have given him considerable leverage for a former stormtrooper, but for now he would have to bide his time.  
  
When Fox realized her eyes had lingered on Poe for so long he was now looking back at her, she tore her gaze off him. The needs of the Resistance came before any individual – even if it sometimes meant making very difficult decisions.  
  
“It’s another Death Star,” a senior officer commented finally, breaking the stunned silence.  
  
“I wish that was the case,” Poe said darkly, bringing up another hologram. “This was the Death Star… And _this_ … is Starkiller Base.” Poe scaled the holograms so that their size difference became obvious. Next to the ice planet, the Death Star looked laughably insignificant.  
  
A wave of gasps and mutters swept through the crowd, and Fox noticed that even the ever-confident Han Solo looked uneasy.  
  
If it hadn’t been clear earlier, Poe’s comparison made the point abundantly clear. Starkiller Base was nothing like either of the Death Stars. It was much worse. It dwarfed any threat the Galactic Empire had envisioned with its sheer size. As Fox studied the map of the ice planet, turned instrument of destruction, she could not deny this was more than just the result of engineering genius in the wrong hands.  
  
It was _evil_.  
  
“How did they build this?” Major Brance said incredulously.  
  
“The more immediate concern is how do we destroy it,” Fox deadpanned, tired of the technical debate.  
  
“But _how_?” Brance countered.  
  
“Finn?” Poe prompted, gesturing at the map encouragingly. “You worked on the Base.”  
  
“Please,” Admiral Statura spoke up. “Anything more you know about how it works?”  
  
Finn started talking. By the time he and Statura were done, they had identified a possible weak point: the thermal oscillator. If their X-wings could destroy it just as the weapon was fully loaded and at its most vulnerable, the rest of the construct – and possibly the entire planet – would follow.  
  
Before that, however, the planetary shield would need to be disabled, a task which Finn assured he could do, provided he could get on the planet.  
  
“I’ll get you there,” Han Solo spoke up, with more than a hint of bravado.  
  
“Han?” Leia spoke up, sounding less like a General and more like the man’s wife.  
  
“If I told you, you wouldn’t like it,” he muttered, shrugging sheepishly.  
  
Fox had been so engrossed in listening to the discussion that she had not noticed Lieutenant Mako’s discreet approach. At a glance, Fox could tell something was terribly wrong. Mako looked pale and terrified, clutching a datapad against her chest.  
  
“What is it?” Fox whispered, noticing out of the corner of her eye how their quiet conversation seemed to have caught Poe’s attention as well.  
  
“Wexley wasn’t the only pilot on a recon flight,” Mako answered and, with a shaking hand, held out the datapad for Fox.  
  
As Fox looked over it, she felt as if the blood in her veins had turned to ice. According to what she was looking, an unknown, cloaked ship had followed Wexley to the Ileenium system. The Resistance’s scanners had failed to detect the ship until it had jumped to hyperspace to return to its base – possible the same one the Resistance was so busy trying to understand.  
  
“It could be just a smuggler,” Mako whispered. “It might not be – ”  
  
“We both know full well what it is,” Fox interrupted sharply, her shoulders tightening.  
  
To protect the location of the Resistance Base from any unwanted parties, they had several safeguards and constant surveillance in place. Had she missed something? The Recon Center was constantly staffed by at least one person, and even more people kept an eye on their scanners in the Command Center, day and night. Fox saw everything on her monitors, so how and when had the spy ship slipped past the Resistance’s net?  
  
Poe, she realized, her eyes flicking back over to where he stood.  
  
He had come to the Recon Center with Finn after returning from D’Qar, just as Wexley was returning from his mission. She had turned away from her monitors, hadn’t she? Alone in the Blue Room and distracted by what she had seen on the landing strip, she could have missed a lone, unclear blip on their radars.  
  
Fox squeezed her eyes shut, struggling to accept the implications of the spy ship’s visit to their system.  
  
“Colonel?” Mako prompted anxiously. “Should I report this to the General?”  
  
“Not you,” Fox said after a moment. “I’ll do it myself.”  
  
She took a deep breath and moved over to Leia. “Excuse the interruption but – ”  
  
“General, we’ve detected an enormous amount of dark energy rushing towards Starkiller Base!” Brance shouted from across the room.  
  
“Please, General,” Fox said urgently, holding out the datapad for Leia. “They’ve found us.”  
  
Leia help up a hand to Brance, asking him to wait a moment. She took one look at the datapad, nodded at her Colonel and addressed the room: “That can only mean one thing. The First Order is loading the weapon again.” She paused before adding solemnly: “And I think we can all take a good guess what their next target will be.”  
  
“All the more reason for us to get going,” Poe said fearlessly, his voice carrying over the horrified gasps. “Disable their shields and hit that oscillator with everything we’ve got. Sounds like a plan to me, let’s go!”  
  
Although the Resistance’s small numbers dictated that they were always the underdogs in any confrontation, their compact squadrons could also be mobilized far faster than any large fleet of fighters. At Poe’s determined call to action, the entire Base became a hive of activity. Fox returned to the Blue Room and ordered her team to go through Wexley’s data again with a fine-toothed comb.  
  
“Anything can give us an edge,” she instructed. “Location of planetary cannons, an estimate of the number of enemy fighters we can expect, grooves in the surface of the structure that our pilots can exploit. Whatever it is, _find it_.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” a chorus of voices responded.  
  
Focusing on work would be a welcome change to the constant worry that ate away at her mind, despite her attempts to beat the feelings back. A part of her had wanted to pull Poe aside after the strategy session to tell him… What? To be careful again? That she didn’t want him to take any unnecessary risks?  
  
Or something far stupider and irrevocably honest?  
  
It might have been for the best that there had been no time to speak to Poe. Right now, Fox’s best bet to protect him was BB-8. She went to her monitor, wondering whether the droid would have enough time to install the bypass chip unnoticed.  
  
Hopefully that little astromech is as clever as I think it is, she thought.  
  
“The X-wings are taking off, ma’am,” Mauvi called out.  
  
“And the Falcon?”  
  
“Ahead of them, leaving D’Qar’s atmosphere as we speak.”  
  
Fox was about to tell her team to hurry up with the data mining, but then unexpectedly, Poe’s voice filled the Recon Center.  
  
“Is this a secure connection?” he asked.  
  
“Of course it is,” Fox answered, listening intently as her team perked up. “What is it, Black Leader?”  
  
“I thought of something today,” he said cheerily.  
  
Fox rolled her eyes. “I have a feeling I’ll regret asking, but go ahead, Commander. Amaze us.”  
  
“I’ve been thinking about names, Colonel. And I realized that ‘Poe Fox’ would be a great one.”  
  
Fox could hardly hear herself sighing because half her team coughed to keep from giggling out loud while the rest exercised their very best gambling faces.  
  
“You are on the Blue Room’s speaker,” Fox muttered in a subtly disciplinary tone.  
  
“… BB-8, I thought I told you to use the other line! _Well_ , that leaves me with exactly zero dark secrets to be ashamed of. Not a bad feeling, considering the circumstances.”  
  
“Focus on the task at hand, Dameron,” Fox said. “We’ve got a First Order base to blow up.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Poe said, a grin apparent in his voice. “Since the good Colonel is the one of us with experience of doing something like that, now would be the time to share any tips.”  
  
”Just light it up, Commander,” she said, ignoring the curious looks her team gave her at the mention of her experience. “It worked just fine for me, no reason it shouldn’t apply today. Give us your best, Black Leader.”  
  
“Always, ma’am,” he assured.  
  
Before Fox could answer, Leia’s voice rang out from the Command Center: “Alright, everyone. We have a tough few hours ahead. Black Leader, squadrons… may the Force be with you all.”  
  
“And you, General,” Poe responded.

* * *

There were too many of them.  
  
After Finn, Han Solo and Chewbacca had disabled the planetary shields, the X-wings had done a successful bombing run and prepared for another one. But then, the TIE fighters had arrived, and the Resistance pilots had been forced to engage them. Due to being seriously outnumbered, they had not been able to complete another run over the oscillator. For a time, the battle had been even, and they had managed to bring down several enemy ships, but the Resistance’s modest Starfighter Corps could only hold out against overwhelming odds for so long.  
  
It started with just one X-wing, a casualty they had been prepared for. But another followed it, tumbling down to the icy surface of the planet. Soon after, a third was hit.  
  
Fox had made her way back to the Command Center to follow the battle with the other high-ranking officers. After sending the X-wings’ astromechs all key information about the area around the oscillator, she and her team had done all they could for the pilots. Yet Fox wondered whether she should have sent in her own corvette to provide a bigger target for the TIE fighters. The ship would have likely been the first to go down, but at least it could have bought the X-wings some extra time. The ship had large cannons and it was fast. Theoretically, it might have –  
  
Fox huffed, frustrated with herself. Why was it so hard to think of viable options all of a sudden? Her eyes were glued to the readouts detailing the condition of their remaining fighters. To be specific, she was mostly looking at the readouts of the Black One, still perfectly intact.  
  
As the fighter’s shields fluttered for a moment after deflecting a direct hit, Fox was grateful that everyone was too busy following the events to notice her practically eating her fingernails.  
  
“How long until the weapon is ready to fire?” Admiral Statura asked, sounding concerned.  
  
“Five minutes,” Brance replied and wiped at his face with a sleeve.  
  
The answer confirmed Fox’s fear. They were quickly running out of time – and X-wings. As two more fighters were lost, Fox heard a few of the youngest officers in the Command Center begin to cry quietly even as they continued to take care of their stations. No one, not even Ackbar, bothered to shush them. Every senior officer in the Resistance had experience of difficult battles and heavy losses, but Fox doubted any of them had ever been faced with such a dismal outlook.  
  
Although she was very good at keeping up a calm exterior, she felt her pulse as a frantic pounding against her wrists and throat and thought it reminded her too much of the heartbeat of a terrified creature.  
  
“That’s half our fleet gone,” Ackbar said as another X-wing fell.  
  
“Where is the Falcon?” Fox asked, hoping the old freighter could lend the fighters a hand.  
  
“We haven’t had any word from Han Solo, I’m afraid,” Brance answered. “It’s likely the Falcon is still somewhere on Starkiller.”  
  
That was when Fox felt more than saw General Organa freeze next to her, before she fell to her seat, tears rolling down her cheeks.  
  
“General!” Fox said in a hushed tone, immediately leaning down to Leia, and laid a careful hand on the older woman’s arm. An unnatural silence settled over them even as the rest of the room continued calling out increasingly discouraging updates to the leaders.  
  
“General Organa? Leia?” Fox prompted in her gentlest tone, when she wouldn’t react to her touch.  
  
Leia looked at her then, a shattered look in her teary eyes.  
  
“He’s gone,” she whispered in a thin voice and shuddered, hiding her face in her hands.  
  
For a terrifying moment, Fox thought she meant Poe. But there had been no wave of incredulous shouts over the Commander being shot down, which she would have expected in such an event. As Fox took in the state the General was in, she realized Leia must have meant Han Solo.  
  
It seemed so improbable that a man who only a few hours ago had stood with them in the Command Center, ready for yet another impossible task, would not return. He’d had his Falcon, his trusted co-pilot, and the brave Finn – and yet something had gone wrong.  
  
Fox could only imagine what it must have been like to feel the death of a loved one leave a gaping wound into the Force.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Fox said softly, squeezing Leia’s shoulder.  
  
Fox straightened and, instead of announcing the casualty to the room, she tried to remember what was the last thing she had said to Poe. She had told him to focus on the mission, hadn’t she? He’d made a joke and she had responded in her taciturn way, telling him to just get on with the task ahead.  
  
She looked at her colleagues around her, wondering what they were thinking. Their families, perhaps, as they still did their best to perform their duties. She noticed a young radar technician lace his fingers with the man who sat closest to him. At the panorama window of the Blue Room, Fox could see Kell and Mako standing next to each other, looking lost, hoping the Colonel could help.  
  
Fox simply nodded at her Lieutenants. She had no more orders left to give them.  
  
“Two minutes until it fires,” Brance said stiffly.  
  
Fox raised her eyes back to the Black One’s readouts.  
  
I should have told him how much I’ll miss him if he doesn’t return, she thought. With the way things were looking, she wouldn’t have to miss him for very long before following him over to the abyss.  
  
While she had no official orders left, there _was_ one desperate measure she could resort to. She could withdraw from the Command Center and call on Poe – and order him to disengage immediately and to fall back. He could break away from the battle and, if he gave it his all, he could outrun the TIE fighters with his enhanced X-wing.  
  
Then at least he might survive if all the rest were left to burn.  
  
Of course Fox knew he would never obey such an order, would probably even resent her for it. Then she would be forced to watch how the Black One would eventually fall from the sky and crash into the icy planet, taking its pilot down with it.  
  
That was when the oscillator began to explode from the side.  
  
“All units, this is Black Leader,” Poe said. “That oscillator has a brand new hole in its side, that’s our opening!”  
  
On the monitors, Fox could see three X-wings break away from the defensive battle against the TIE fighters and dive towards the oscillator.  
  
“Watch my back, I’m going in,” he said and disappeared inside the oscillator.  
  
“Pava, what the hell is he doing?” Fox asked without thinking.  
  
“Not sure, Colonel,” she responded honestly. “But I’m seeing a series of smaller explosions going around the oscillator. The Commander must be blasting away on the inside.”  
  
Idiot, Fox thought, trying to estimate how quickly Poe would have to fly to make it out before the oscillator collapsed on top of the fighter. If he went too fast, the Black One would not be able to turn as sharply and would collide with the inner wall of the structure.  
  
Unless, of course, it was no ordinary X-wing anymore, Fox thought as her nails dug into the palm of her hand.  
  
“Any sign of Dameron?” Brance asked after a moment.  
  
“Not yet,” Jessika Pava answered. “Wait, there he is! The Black One is trailing a bit of smoke but looks unharmed.”  
  
“A chain reaction has begun,” Admiral Statura supplied, a smile on his face. “The planet can’t contain the energy of the fully loaded weapon without the oscillator.”  
  
“Have we won?” Brance asked, cautious joy blooming in his eyes. “Is it over?”  
  
As if to answer, the surface of Starkiller Base began to crack and fall apart, collapsing towards the center of the planet. Several young officers began celebrating as the Resistance’s victory became apparent.  
  
“All fighters, retreat at once!” Ackbar ordered over the noise.  
  
“With all due respect, Admiral, we’re not leaving the Falcon behind,” Poe countered.  
  
“There’s going to be debris flying everywhere,” Fox interjected. “ _Get out of there!_ ”  
  
“All teams, I’ve got eyes on them,” Poe said happily just as the Falcon appeared in the Base’s monitors, soaring rapidly from the critically unstable planet. “We’re on our way, Colonel. Our job’s done here! Let’s go home.”  
  
As the last of the X-wings jumped to light speed at the Black One’s lead, Fox grabbed the edge of a table to steady herself as the relief almost buckled her knees.  
  
They had survived their darkest hour – and Poe Dameron was on his way home.

* * *

This time, Fox did not go to the landing strip to see him. She was hoping to have a moment to herself as her team left the Blue Room to celebrate the return of their squadrons and welcome their friends back to Base. They had deserved the moment of peace, particularly concerning what would have to be done next. With certain dangerous individuals still alive with knowledge of the Resistance’s presence in the Ileenium system, the lush D’Qar was no longer safe. They would have to relocate as soon as possible.  
  
Sighing, Fox brought up an overview of a select few star systems she had already mapped out, in case the D’Qar base was compromised. Luckily, the destruction of Starkiller Base would have the First Order in disarray for a while, giving the Resistance more time to plan their next move.  
  
“Colonel Fox,” a familiar voice called to her.  
  
She closed her eyes, silently willing the man to go away, before turning to greet him with a smile. He was still in his orange pilot suit, his hair an impossibly attractive, tousled mess.  
  
“Commander Dameron. Good job, lighting up Starkiller Base.”  
  
“Thank you,” he replied and took a few more steps into the room, idly glancing at the datapads and headsets scattered on the big table in the middle of the space. He smirked, giving her a mischievous look. “This isn’t like you.”  
  
She shrugged. “Even I can let some things slide on special occasions. And I think this victory counts as one.”  
  
Poe said nothing as he made a few neat piles of the abandoned datapads. He then fiddled with a broken earpiece and took a deep breath.  
  
“I wanted to thank you,” he said, not looking at her face. “The additional information your team sent us about the surface structure of the base was a great help.”  
  
“My pleasure,” she said, feeling self-conscious, and shifted in place. “But next time, I should urge you to avoid flying inside anything that’s already on fire and about to disintegrate.”  
  
Poe laughed, the rich sound filling the room pleasantly. “It worked, didn’t it?”  
  
“I suppose it did,” Fox conceded and tried to hide her grin. “Where is Finn?”  
  
A shadow passed over his face and the mirth left his eyes. “He is in the Medi-Bay. He was injured by Kylo Ren – with a lightsaber.”  
  
From what Fox had read and heard about lightsaber injuries, they were excruciatingly painful and took a long time to heal. Even if the young man would make a full recovery, he would be scarred for the rest of his life.  
  
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said honestly. “Is his life in danger?”  
  
“Doctor Kalonia has patched him up as best she could and he’s out of immediate danger,” Poe said. “Kalonia says he’ll be alright, but he’s got ways to go before he gets up.”  
  
Fox nodded. “How is BB-8? The battle must have been a scary ride for it.”  
  
Poe smiled again. “BB-8 is fine. Busily inspecting the damage to the Black One. It got a little singed by the flames, so some panels might need changing.”  
  
“Talk to Snipes if you need something replaced,” Fox said. “I’m not entirely sure where he gets all those spares but his stock seems endless.”  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind.”  
  
They stood in awkward silence for a moment until Poe said: “I should go. I think I’m still supposed to have some sort of debriefing with Ackbar.”  
  
“Alright,” she said, disappointed that he was leaving so soon.  
  
He hovered for a moment before turning abruptly to go.  
  
“Poe, I…” Fox blurted out. She trailed off, gazing at her feet, mortified after his first name had once again slipped from her mouth.  
  
“Yes?” he said expectantly, turning back towards her.  
  
The words sat in her throat. Words that would have told him how helpless she had felt as an X-wing after another was shot down, and how – after their General had become stricken with the loss of her husband – Fox had realized that she did not care to go through anything like it. That Poe’s death was not something she could ever stomach.  
  
She looked up at him and almost felt guilty for keeping him there, waiting to hear what she had to say.  
  
“Nothing,” Fox said eventually, waving a hand dismissively.  
  
Poe’s brow furrowed but after hesitating for a second, he simply nodded and left. Even after he had disappeared from view, Fox stared at the empty doorway, wondering how long she would have to keep beating back her feelings before they finally ebbed away, and he would become just another Commander, just another pilot, just another body to throw at the First Order – instead of what he truly was to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a nightmare to write. I hope you guys like it, anyway.
> 
> The next one will be from Poe's POV. I don't want to spoil anything for you, but I'll tell you this: the last two chapters are the ones I have been absolutely dying to work on since the day I published the first chapter.
> 
> And 90 kudos! ;__; Thank you! Every single kudos and compliment means A LOT to me.
> 
> Just like a thermal oscillator, my beta is an integral part of the monstrous construct that is my fic writing.


	10. One of a Kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which BB-8 plays its ace and Poe goes ASDFGHJKL.

For reasons no one could figure out, R2-D2 whirred back to life soon after the battle of Starkiller Base. After first greeting and insulting C-3PO in a few beeps, the droid announced it had the rest of the map needed to find its master, much to everyone’s surprise and delight. When BB-8 and R2 lined up the projected holograms, Poe noticed a satisfied smile on Fox’s face as she murmured something to her young Lieutenants.  
  
Despite her grief, even Leia looked like a weight had finally been lifted off her shoulders, allowing her to breathe more easily. Not only had her brother finally been found, he would soon receive a very special visitor: Rey. The young woman had stood against Kylo Ren in the snowy forest of Starkiller Base and had walked away victorious. If anyone could bring Luke Skywalker back from his exile and step up to resist the rising darkness, it was her.  
  
The triumph, however, had not come cheap. Led by a solemn General Organa, clad in a long blue dress, the Resistance held a modest memorial on the landing strip for the pilots they had lost at Starkiller Base. Although the General’s most important duty was to ensure strong morale, Leia never downplayed the impact such loss of life carried. Death in combat signified more than a blow to their military strength. It meant that irreplaceable voices had been silenced and that families scattered across the galaxy would receive the news they had been dreading ever since their loved ones left to join the Resistance.  
  
As important as it was to stop for a moment and pay respects to the fallen ones, it was also necessary to look to the future. With several members of the Resistance looking on, Leia embraced Rey as a mother would her child, before sending her off to travel to the blue planet where Luke waited. As they watched Rey take her seat in the Falcon’s cockpit beside Chewbacca, Poe had a strong feeling he wasn’t the only one who felt honored to witness the beginning of Rey’s journey as a Jedi.  
  
After the crowd had dispersed, Poe found himself standing on the landing strip, still looking at the spot in the sky where the Falcon had finally disappeared from view. Although seeing Rey off had lifted the spirits in the Base after the memorial, the empty spaces where half of their X-wings should have been were impossible to ignore – particularly for Poe.  
  
The friends they had lost had deserved to come back just like he had, but there was nothing more he could have done for them. Although he had settled into the everyday reality of being the Commander of his own squadrons and having responsibilities such a rank brought, he didn’t think he would ever be able to shrug off the death of a fellow pilot as the simple price of war. That they all had agreed to pay the ultimate price did not mean it was a reasonable cost. For their sake, the Resistance _had to prevail_.  
  
Poe tugged at the tight collar of his formal Commander’s uniform and walked over to where Star-1 should have been. A dark oil spot was still visible on the tarmac from the many services the X-wing had been through before its final flight. As soon as the giddy joy of destroying Starkiller Base had subsided, Poe had kept replaying the battle in his mind, wondering if he could have done something differently.  
  
Beside him, BB-8 made an inquisitive sound.  
  
“I am, Baby,” Poe sighed, glancing down at the small droid. “This is just getting harder every time.”  
  
Although this wasn’t the first time Poe had lost his co-pilots to enemy fire, the confrontation at Starkiller Base had been his worst combat experience yet. He couldn’t fathom how Leia Organa had managed to keep a level head through the years despite being haunted by the memory of the men and women who had perished to protect the Rebel Alliance. Even Ackbar sometimes showed signs of fatigue that just wouldn’t quite go away.  
  
And then there was Nylah Fox, pulling the strings in the shadows.  
  
Fox and General Organa had the highest security clearance in the Resistance and were the only ones privy to every piece of information, the scope of which Poe couldn’t begin to guess. Still, he had to wonder how many times Fox had been forced to make a choice that would result in the demise of one of her agents because the alternative would have hurt the Resistance’s agenda. Fox may have given each of her agents a portable emergency transmitter as a kind of a life insurance, but Poe wasn’t naïve enough to believe she would always come when called.  
  
Or so he had suspected until she had dropped everything to fetch him from Jakku – and lost her temper because of his thoughtless insinuations of callousness on her part. Clocking in several hours in space over the last few days meant Poe had had plenty of time to think about Fox’s actions, starting with her insistence to stick to mission parameters which they had clashed over at first.  
  
If victories in battle came at a price, then so did the information that tipped the balance of light and dark in the Resistance’s favor. Poe had seen the worry etched into the fine lines around Fox’s eyes and mouth, telling a story of a commanding officer who stayed up nights to watch over her agents. She had extended that same concern to him and his squadrons as they patrolled the Jakku system, even though it hadn’t even been her mission.  
  
How many military spymasters kept a fast ship just to be able to personally extract their operatives at a moment’s notice? Poe looked over to where the matte grey Nubian corvette was being worked on by a few astromechs, ready to depart immediately in case one of her agents needed help.  
  
Suddenly the memory of Fox inspecting the ship with her top buttons undone flashed through his mind so vividly, he had to shake his head. Evidently, his crush was getting out of hand.  
  
“Buddy, your pilot is such a moron,” he groaned, much to BB-8’s obvious amusement. “Oh, you agree?” He sighed, trying to get the Colonel out of his mind. “C’mon, there’s something I need to ask Jessika.”  
  
They found her chatting animatedly with her droid and the grey-haired Snipes, assessing the damage to her blue-marked fighter.  
  
“Poe!” she greeted. “We were just talking about maybe upgrading the ships’ shields since the new TIEs are pretty nasty.”  
  
“Did they knock you around a lot at Starkiller, then?” Poe asked.  
  
“A little,” Jessika said, cringing.  
  
“A little?” Snipes muttered, pointing at a half-melted panel on the side of the ship.  
  
“More than I would have liked,” she admitted. “They took down my shields for a moment.”  
  
Despite the damage to her fighter, Jessika had nothing to be embarrassed about. The Black One had also taken its fair share of hits, and Poe wasn’t quite sure how he had avoided as many blasts as he had.  
  
“This might be a kind of a weird question,” Poe said, looking at her ship studiously. “But how has your X-wing been to fly lately?”  
  
“Same as always,” she replied, shrugging. “Can’t complain at least. How so?”  
  
Poe rubbed the back of his neck, glancing at his black fighter where it sat opposite to Jessika’s. “Nothing. It’s just that… mine’s handling a bit strangely. Like there’s nothing between what I want to do and what the flight computer allows.”  
  
“Isn’t that a good thing? Weren’t you complaining about it holding you back?”  
  
“Yeah, I know but… look, it sounds weird, but I think someone modified it.”  
  
“Who could have done it?” Jessika asked, narrowing her eyes.  
  
“Damned if I know,” Poe huffed. “Someone who’s very handy with computers.”  
  
“Well, whoever did it, they just did you a favor. Seems like you’ve got someone taking care of you.”  
  
“I suppose so,” he agreed absent-mindedly, recalling how his shock had turned to joy when the Black One had shot forwards faster than he had expected, creating the illusion of the chasing TIE fighters going backwards. “See you later, Jess.”  
  
Lost in thought, Poe walked to the Black One, which had already been serviced right before the memorial. BB-8 began busily doing inventory of the wires and bolts Snipes had left next to the fighter, sorting them into salvageable and non-salvageable. The droid babbled to itself, its binary monologue occasionally punctuated by high-pitched squeaks as it found another shiny bolt.  
  
Poe ran his eyes over the ship’s wings and sides, remembering the faint groaning sound the lightweight durasteel had made as he had forced the X-wing to turn sharply at speeds the craft wasn’t supposed to be capable of in the atmosphere.  
  
“Strange,” he murmured, running a hand through his hair. “Someone must really love me.” He laughed to himself. “A secret admirer. How about that, BB-8?”  
  
The droid’s nonchalant reply sent Poe’s pulse to a rapidly accelerating course.  
  
BB-8 would have happily rolled off to take the unsalvageable wires to the workshops to be repurposed if Poe hadn’t rounded on it.  
  
“Wait, wait a minute, buddy!” he said, kneeling down to the droid. “Did you just say _Fox_ did this?”  
  
BB-8 repeated itself impatiently before it wheeled around him and went on its way, beeping something about having finished its work.  
  
Poe watched BB-8 disappear from sight, feeling like his brain had just short-circuited. _Why_ would she do such a thing?  
  
He thought back to his interactions with the Colonel, from formal meetings to their private – and at times not so private – banter over the comms lines. He had entertained the belief that the moments when the Colonel seemed to let her guard down were an indication of him finally gaining her trust, after a long time of her merely suffering his presence. He had even ventured to hope that perhaps one day, when they finally hung up their uniforms and all considerations of rank could be put aside, he could even call her a friend.  
  
But, to his quickly increasing delight, it seemed he had been misreading her.  
  
Poe scampered to his feet to dig around in his pockets and found the small, yet to be reset transmitter he had slipped into his pants and forgotten to return. He rolled it over in his hand, remembering just how serious Fox had seemed, emphasizing the item’s importance should he run into trouble, and how differently she had spoken when she had asked him to take care on the perilous mission. And then later – in the dark space above the desert planet – how Fox’s shoulders had been set painfully straight as she had listened to his account of being tortured.  
  
Most of all, however, he thought of the sound of her laughter, reaching him across the emptiness of space, her exasperated huffs as he had made yet another snarky assessment she couldn’t put down in a formal report, and how vulnerable she had sounded when she had finally told him what had happened on Anoth, asking him if he thought her a monster.  
  
The fact that she had actually plotted with his own droid to modify his X-wing was just an added bonus, as far as he was concerned.  
  
Poe put the transmitter back in his pocket and tried to stop himself from floating into the clouds. It _was_ pretty obvious now that he really thought of it.  
  
“She likes me,” Poe said dumbly to no one in particular and looked up at his X-wing.  
  
So why hadn’t she said anything?  
  
Like everyone else in the Resistance, Poe knew relationships between commanding officers and their subordinates were largely discouraged for a multitude of perfectly rational reasons. The Rebel Alliance of old may have been rather lax, even to a fault, about such things, but certain policies had eventually been set to avoid favoritism or other influences that could get in the way of the mission objective.  
  
Fox especially had to remain as impartial as she could; a difficult task if she had to send someone she loved on a possible suicide mission.  
  
There was also the matter of her sense of duty, he realized. She wouldn’t want anyone to question her integrity or accuse her of misusing her position, which might very well happen if she went and swept a younger officer – a fighter pilot to boot – off his feet.  
  
Unless, of course, a dashing pilot just went and swept _her_ off her feet, Poe thought, grinning to himself as an idea took shape in his mind.  
  
It was obvious Commander Poe Dameron’s next mission would require a delicate yet decisive touch.  
  
He set off at a jog towards the main complex of the Base, fully intent on finding Fox immediately. He spotted Lieutenant Mako by the entrance, chatting with a young mechanic. Having learned the black-haired Lieutenant was never far from Fox, he decided to approach her.  
  
“Mako!” he called out.  
  
“Commander,” she said, giving him a brief once-over. “How can I help you?”  
  
He suddenly realized he hadn’t thought the actual implementation of his idea through, but it was too late to back out of the conversation.  
  
“Would you happen to know where Fox is?” he asked, hoping he sounded as casual as possible.  
  
“Probably in the Blue Room,” she answered slowly. “Why? Is something the matter?”  
  
“No,” he said, looking away. “Great, I’ll check there. Thanks, Lieutenant. As you were.”  
  
Poe half-ran, half-walked through the maze of the underground base, hoping to reach the Blue Room before his senses talked him out of what he was about to do. Just outside the Recon Center, he stopped to straighten his uniform and smooth down his hair and realized that he was actually quite nervous. In the worst-case scenario, he was _hideously_ wrong and she would ban him from addressing her directly for an unforeseeable length of time. Or she might just send him on a very special recon mission to the nearest lavatory to scrub the floors with his bare hands.  
  
But the possibility that she might react in the best of ways was just too tantalizing for him to turn back and pretend nothing had changed. He bit his lip, trying to contain his excitement. Just the way he had caught her looking at him in the main conference room before Starkiller Base had been tantamount to torture. Not to mention their latest encounter when she had again called him by his first name.  
  
Fortune favors the bold, he thought rashly, feeling his confidence return.  
  
He swiped his hand over the panel by the door to open it and stepped inside to see Fox at the far end of the room, talking with Obatu Wolke. The tattooed agent nodded at Poe in greeting as he spotted him. The gesture caught Fox’s attention and she turned to see who their visitor was.  
  
“Commander?” Fox said lightly, raising an elegant eyebrow.  
  
He _really_ hadn’t thought this through – but he couldn’t help the smile that stole across his face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fox is in for it now. *maniacal laughter*
> 
> Without my beta, this chapter would not be a chapter. It would be a turd.


	11. Nylah

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I will think of you, you  
> who are so far away  
> you have caused me to look up at the stars."
> 
> \- Under Stars by Tess Gallagher

Do _not_ swoon, Fox ordered herself as she took in the sight that was Poe Dameron in his official uniform. It didn’t help that the man was smiling brightly, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.  
  
She had just finished a short meeting with Obatu, discussing his recovery and his thoughts about possible locations for the Resistance’s new base. An assortment of blue holograms floated in the room, depicting a wide selection of habitable planets and their moons. Fox and Obatu had started out with just one planet and had kept adding more options until the room was filled with translucent spheres ranging in size.  
  
Then Poe had come in, looking like one of her daydreams and she had promptly forgotten what she had been about to say next. Thankfully, she had time to school her features as Poe decided to greet her agent first.  
  
“Good to see you up and about, Obatu,” the Commander said pleasantly. “You’re looking well.”  
  
“Still sore but getting better every day, Commander,” the Mirialan answered. “That’s for sure.”  
  
Poe nodded before turning his attention back to Fox. The look in his eyes almost startled her then. It was entirely in contradiction with his light tone and careless smile, and she wondered what was going through his mind.  
  
“I was hoping you could spare a moment to talk,” Poe said, clasping his hands behind his back, still smiling like someone had brought him breakfast in bed.  
  
She glanced at Obatu, standing beside her with an unreadable look on his face. “Alright, Dameron. What is it?”  
  
“It’s… well, it’s classified.” The man’s smile morphed into a smirk.  
  
Fox sighed, seriously doubting Poe knew something she didn’t.  
  
“Please excuse us, Obatu,” she relented nonetheless, keeping her eyes trained on the pilot.  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” the agent answered and walked past Poe, exchanging brief glances with him.  
  
“Go ahead,” Fox prompted once the door slid shut.  
  
“Right…” he said, looking away in an unexpected display of nervousness. He deliberated for a moment, his eyes following a hologram of Dagobah, before he took a deep breath.  
  
“BB-8 and I just had an interesting chat,” Poe began, taking a few slow steps closer.  
  
“And this is classified?” she drawled, crossing her arms. “Don’t you talk to your droid every day?”  
  
“I certainly do,” he admitted. “But this conversation was a bit different than the usual.”  
  
“Oh?” In an effort to stop her eyes from wandering inappropriately, she decided to focus on a random planet that happened to be drifting past him.  
  
“At Starkiller, I couldn’t help but notice that the Black One’s handling had… drastically changed since Takodana.”  
  
That damn droid, she thought on instinct, suspicious of where Poe might have been going with his long-winded introduction. While there was nothing surprising about him noticing that the fighter flew differently, his decision to come to her about it was alarming.  
  
“If there is something wrong with your X-wing, talk to Snipes,” she said and turned back to look at Poe – only to realize he had advanced on her further.  
  
“But there is nothing wrong with it,” he countered happily. “On the contrary, in fact. It’s never handled quite like this. It’s almost like someone knew I didn’t like the flight computer and had something done to it.”  
  
He knows, she realized. Whatever BB-8 had told him had allowed him to connect the dots and he had figured out his Colonel had developed a soft spot for him. Whether he had come to gloat or to tell her she had crossed a line, it wasn’t like Fox to fold quite so easily.  
  
She decided the best course of action was to feign total and utter ignorance.  
  
“So some young mechanic is sweet on you, overheard you complain about it to the General and decided to tweak your X-wing to impress you. Case solved.”  
  
Poe shrugged. “Could be. I’m simply wondering who might be so well-connected that they can get their hands on a rare bypass chip so quickly. But I really should point out here… I didn’t say I talked about this with Leia.”  
  
Her rapidly rising panic reached new levels. What an excellent spymaster I am, Fox thought. Can’t handle two minutes of friendly interrogation without ratting myself out.  
  
“Shouldn’t you go change out of that uniform?” she said quickly, trying not to look at him.  
  
“Oh this?” he said, glancing down at himself. “Actually, I was thinking I could wear it more often.”  
  
Please don’t, her brain screamed.  
  
Desperate for ways to avoid the rest of the conversation, she pulled a stack of datapads closer to herself. “I really should sign off on these reports.”  
  
Poe craned his neck to steal a glance at the documents. “The date on those is from last week.” He flashed her a knowing grin.  
  
In all her time as a soldier, Fox would never have guessed she would one day be standing in the Recon Center, surrounded by blue spheres and silently praying for an alarm to go off for an excuse to escape from a handsome X-wing pilot.  
  
“Why did you do this for me, Fox?” Poe asked softly after a moment.  
  
She looked at him and could see, beyond any doubt, that he understood things far beyond the modified X-wing.  
  
When she didn’t answer, he continued: “I know that you and BB-8 worked together to customize my X-wing. And I’m really impressed because BB-8 wouldn’t have agreed to it unless it _trusted_ you.”  
  
“It’s a remarkable little droid,” she said, hoping to change the subject. “I think I’ve told you that before.”  
  
“But do you understand how rare it is to find people who treat it like a person instead of nothing more than a particularly clever machine? That’s what you do for BB-8, and I really love that. It’s part of the reason I’m here now.”  
  
Fox was barely breathing. The conversation had taken an unexpected turn, and suddenly she was torn between cautious hope and the sheer horror that Poe might reciprocate her feelings. It was a factor she had failed to take into account after convincing herself the man simply went through life making friends like it was nothing.  
  
An impossibly gentle look in his eyes, he took a careful step forward. “Nylah – ”  
  
“ _Don’t_ ,” Fox seethed. “This conversation is not happening.”  
  
“Alright,” he said, stopping a few meters away from her.  
  
“There has been too much talk as it is,” she continued, fixing him with a defiant stare. “I am a Colonel, answering _directly_ to General Organa. You are the Commander of our Starfighter Corps. You are also my _subordinate_. Do you understand how this could look? What repercussions this might have?”  
  
By the look on his face, she had said the words he had been expecting.  
  
“Then tell me to leave,” Poe said. “And I’ll go right now. I promise I’ll never bother you again.”  
  
Fox opened her mouth only to close it again, struggling to come up with a response.  
  
It should have been straightforward to order him to leave and to never bring up the matter again. He would have complied too, she knew. He would have respectfully walked out, and they could have continued on with their duties, pretending nothing had ever passed between them. They would avoid each other, limiting their interactions to official meetings and being on last name basis.  
  
Eventually, Poe would find someone and, if he survived the challenges ahead, he would settle down with that person – and he would forget all about Nylah Fox.  
  
It was not a prospect that appealed to her in the least.  
  
Within his fairly short time with the Resistance, Poe had proved himself to be more than just a reckless fighter pilot – he was brave, intelligent and good-hearted. He had captured her reluctant interest from their first meeting until it had grown out of her control, changing its shape to something that terrifyingly felt like love.  
  
And now that he had figured it out, he had come to her, hopeful and sincere, without a hint of malice or ridicule. Despite his experiences in combat and the losses he had endured since his time with the New Republic Starfleet, he still had an innocence about him that Fox found almost heartbreaking. He had brought out the very best in her, a tenderness she hadn’t realized she was capable of – and it was looking like the object of her desires felt the same.  
  
Poe was the first to break the silence.  
  
“My apologies, ma’am,” he said suddenly, eyes downcast, and turned to go.  
  
“Don’t,” Fox said quickly, reaching a hand towards him before immediately lowering it again. “Don’t go. Please.”  
  
He stopped in his tracks, expecting her to continue.  
  
Unsure of what to say, Fox glanced at the panorama window, knowing that anyone in the Command Center could see inside the Recon Center, although they would not hear the conversation. Sighing, she pressed a button by her monitor and a shade immediately lowered to block the view.  
  
The action had an instant effect on Poe, and his eyes brightened once again.  
  
“This isn’t about the Resistance or Leia Organa or what you do in this room, Nylah,” he said finally. “This…” he gestured between them. “Is between _us_.”  
  
“Even so, how exactly would we keep this between us?” she inquired tiredly, seeing no point to continue her evasive tactic.  
  
“We’ll be discreet,” Poe negotiated, taking another step closer.  
  
“You? _Discreet?_ ” she challenged, yet she was unable to keep from smiling.  
  
He kept approaching her. “I’ve surprised you before. I’d happily do it again.”  
  
He was so close, the toes of their boots were almost touching. Her ability to resist him was quickly crumbling as her hands itched to reach over and pull him to her. And there was that scent again – the one she had first experienced on the landing strip when he had come over to talk to her – the lush and vital green of Yavin 4, utterly beguiling.  
  
Fox wanted to kiss him and couldn’t stop her eyes from flicking to his lips. And if her skills of observation hadn’t completely left her just yet, she thought he may have been thinking of the same thing.  
  
Which is why his next question couldn’t have had better timing.  
  
“Can I kiss you?” he asked huskily.  
  
She nodded slowly, and it was all the encouragement Poe needed.  
  
A gentle smile in his eyes, he closed the distance between them, sliding his hand to rest on her waist. With his other hand, he gently stroked down her cheek, leaving behind a trail of fire, until the tip of his thumb made brief contact with the corner of her lips. The touch was barely there, moving towards her jawline so agonizingly slowly that Fox’s patience was about to snap when his fingers curled behind her neck and tilted her head up the tiniest fraction. Her eyes fluttered shut – and still he didn’t quite kiss her. The tip of his nose pressed against her cheek, his breath an uneven gust of warmth on her face. One final searching look, a slight rasp of stubble and finally, _finally_ , his lips found hers.  
  
At first, it was just the lightest touch of his mouth on hers, but when she didn’t pull away, he deepened the kiss. A warmth unlike anything Fox had ever known began spreading from her chest to every inch of her body until she felt like it would spill over.  
  
Overcome, she pressed forward, knotting her fingers in Poe’s black hair. He groaned his appreciation into the kiss, his grip on her tightening. She felt the tips of his fingers slip underneath the hem of her dark blue shirt, pushing up her undershirt in the process. When his hand touched bare skin, she thought she might actually burst into flames.  
  
Her hand slid down from his hair to his neck, and her breath caught a little when her thumb found his pulse, a quick yet steady beat under his hot skin. When she pressed even closer to him, he smiled against her lips as his hand traveled further up underneath her shirt, brushing against her ribs.  
  
They broke apart, breathing the same air. Poe was looking at her through half-closed eyes, a fetching glow on his cheeks.  
  
“I… uh,” he began, sounding breathless. “That was…”  
  
Fox had to agree but didn’t trust her voice to answer. Instead, she smoothed her fingers over the fading bruise on his right cheek as she studied Poe’s dazed face.  
  
Too busy processing the latest development in their relationship, they failed to notice the door open.  
  
“Ma’am, with so many – _oh_.”  
  
They sprang apart a second too late. Even if Lieutenant Mako hadn’t noticed the little details – that there was little to no distance between their bodies, that Fox’s hand was practically buried into Poe’s hair and that his hand was snugly on her waist under her uniform shirt – their disheveled appearance would have been a dead giveaway.  
  
“Ummm...” Mako stood in the doorway, desperately fighting a smirk. “I was just wondering – actually, nevermind. Colonel, Commander, you just… _carry on_.”  
  
As Mako went on her way, Poe stepped back up to Fox again, raising a hand to the back of her neck. She in turn leaned forward to hide her burning face against his shoulder.  
  
“Think she’ll tell people?” Poe asked calmly, stroking her skin.  
  
“Just Obatu,” Fox muttered against his uniform. “He and Mako are two of a kind. If that had been Numo Ban, he’d take this knowledge to the grave but Mako… she has a mind of her own.”  
  
Poe chuckled. “‘Two of a kind’. It explains the thumbs up.”  
  
“The _what_?”  
  
“Obatu gave me a thumbs up when I came in.”  
  
She groaned. “Wonderful. They probably have a bet going on.”  
  
Poe started vibrating and she looked up at him, confused. It was quite obvious that he was doing his best not to bust a gut laughing.  
  
“What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.  
  
“I think… our cover is blown,” Poe said, making a face.  
  
Fox smacked him lightly, half-tempted to chase him out for interrupting her work so completely. But then he looked at her again in a way that suggested he wanted to try that kissing thing again and again – _most urgently_.  
  
“Alright, Poe,” she said, not bothering to hide her smile. “You have made your case. It is quite compelling.”  
  
“Dare I get my hopes up?” he asked cheekily.  
  
She slid her hands down his chest, thoroughly enjoying his sharp intake of breath. He really had no business coming to the Blue Room looking so attractive. Deciding to skip the verbal approach, she smoothed down his ruffled hair and kissed him once more before drawing back.  
  
“Now, I _really_ do need to get back to work. The nightshift will begin in a few hours and I should prepare to brief my team.”  
  
Poe nodded and took her hands in his, stroking her knuckles with his thumbs.  
  
“And later?” he purred, searching her face for any clues.  
  
She huffed in mock exasperation. “Let me think about it.”  
  
“Deal,” he said and pressed a kiss on her hands before releasing them.  
  
With an amused Fox looking on, he walked backwards towards the door, smiling dreamily. “I won’t be able to think about anything but you for the rest of the day.”  
  
“And whose fault is that?” Fox teased.  
  
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” he said. “This… is a _good_ feeling.”  
  
Not for the first time – and likely not for the last – Fox had to admit Poe was right.  
  
“So really, _when_ do I get to see you again?” he whined, almost at the door.  
  
“How does tonight sound?” she asked, loving the way his eyes widened and how he almost tripped over his own feet.  
  
“It’s a date,” he confirmed, grinning. “BB-8 can help us work out the details. _Discreetly_.” He stopped at the door, obviously reluctant to leave.  
  
“Go!” she said, laughing. “Before I invite you back over here.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” he crooned and finally walked out.  
  
After the door had closed, Fox giggled to herself and adjusted her clothing, trying not to count the hours before she would see Poe again.

* * *

So what happened then?  
  
Colonel Nylah Fox continued as the Head of the Recon Unit, performing her duties according to her high standards. General Organa would sometimes hint at a promotion for her role in the destruction of Starkiller Base, but Fox declined politely, saying she still had far too much to learn before earning the rank of Admiral. Leia accepted this with only a little protest but always remembered to mention a higher rank inevitably meant larger living quarters, more than enough space for two – and a droid.  
  
Some things inevitably changed. After the discussion in the Recon Center, Fox often had a healthy pink tinge on her cheeks, complimenting the red of her hair. These occasions seemed to conveniently coincide with Commander Dameron’s presence at the Base, a detail which did not escape her hawk-eyed team. On those days, Lieutenant Mako would not even bother hiding her smirk as she held out a report for the Colonel, and the young officers would share knowing looks behind Fox’s back until she spoke up, telling everyone to get back to work.  
  
After all, the First Order wasn’t going to disassemble itself.  
  
With BB-8’s frequent visits to the Recon Center, the members of Fox’s team learned to step around it without even looking. Soon, BB-8 was made an official member of the Recon team.  
  
Increasingly often, Fox walked comfortably around the Base, relying less and less on her cane. At Poe’s gentle suggestion, she even ventured to the Medi-Bay to have her knee examined. Doctor Kalonia told her that although the leg would never regain its old strength and she would need a brace for the rest of her life, the shrapnel had moved enough to be removed quite safely.  
  
Fox had yet to decide the date but even the ever-impatient Poe understood that some wounds went even deeper than bone and took their time to heal.  
  
Poe and Fox never found out that Obatu Wolke and Mako hadn’t in fact set up a betting pool about them. However, Leia Organa and BB-8 had.  
  
As a result, the General learned to never bet against the little droid on matters of the heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *collapses*
> 
> Perhaps now that this story is out of my system, Poe Dameron will finally leave me alone. Not likely, though.
> 
> To my beta: From adding commas to helping me with the tricky bits and overall pacing, you have been an invaluable help throughout the writing process. Without you, Nylah Fox would have been left to float in the back of my head, never to be fleshed out, and The Kiss would be nowhere like that. //Thank you.//
> 
> To all who have read my story, left kudos or commented: Thank you for taking this ride with me. If I’ve managed to make at least one of you smile, squeal, huff in frustration or have otherwise caused FEELS, the hours spent on this will easily have been worth it.
> 
> Oh, and one more thing: Apologies about the lack of smut, I know some of you were hoping for it. It just didn't fit into this story arch. If I were to write smut about these two idiots, I’d need several chapters of build-up before the crescendo.
> 
> If you feel like popping in and saying hello, you can find me on Tumblr (morbid-kitty) where I answer messages embarrassingly quickly.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Five Attempts and the Final Straw](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6386830) by [MorbidKitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidKitty/pseuds/MorbidKitty)




End file.
